Like a thief in the night

 

Image from Unsplash

The road was winding, hilly and above all pitch dark. I had lit all the front lights: low beam, high beam and wide beam. She appeared out of nowhere. A darkly dressed woman who walked in the middle of the other half of the road, her gaze directed downwards.

We were more or less used to foxes crossing the road in the Provence at night, but this was something else. You are scared stiff. As your hand reflexively goes to the horn, all sorts of things go through your mind: what is that crazy person doing there, what a relief that she was on the other side of the road, and that one question that would haunt me for days: how would this have ended if she had been on my side of the road?

There wasn't much time to think. Because a car was approaching from the other side. The driver had to be warned! There are two ways to do that: honk, and signal with your lights. I did both, and an old annoyance about operating the high beams came to the fore again: the lever has no clear click between signaling and locking the high beams. Which means that when you want to signal, you often lock the high beams instead. And that's how the message gets lost - alarming flashing becomes irritating blinding. Other cars do it better: there you pull the lever towards you to signal and push it away from you to lock the high beams. Incidentally, the other driver had understood that something was wrong, because they slowed down.

Unexpected things that require due haste will always happen. Sometimes you’ll trust your reflexes (braking for a child crossing the road), other times you’ll make a note that you have to look at it sometime (a rattle in the car). The desired reaction time depends on two aspects. One is the time factor: how much time do you have to avert the disaster, or to repair damage that has already occurred? The other is the impact factor: how quickly do you have to react to minimize the undesirable consequences of an event?

In the past few days the Netherlands have seen an event in the 'urgent' category: a malfunction in the Defence network NAFIN, which not only affected Defence itself, but also the rest of the country. Eindhoven Airport (also a military airbase) came to a complete standstill, the communication networks of the emergency services failed, municipalities could not issue driving licences and citizens could not log in to government services because the authentication service, DigiD, was not available. In short: the impact (even socially) was great and a quick recovery was very much desired. Of course we all want to know what caused this malfunction. The Minister of Defence reported on this: "The cause of the problem was in the access to the so-called Netherlands Armed Forces Integrated Network (NAFIN). Due to an error in the software code, a problem arose in the time synchronization on the network. As a result, it was not possible to connect to this network. There is currently no indication that the malfunction was caused by a malicious party."

The latter was said quite quickly, so quickly that I initially wondered whether it was not more of an incantation than reality. But now there is a plausible story: components of the network that wanted to connect to each other were denied access because their clocks were not running in sync; that is how I interpret the ministerial explanation. Compare it to a link that you get when you click on "I forgot my password" somewhere. Those links often have a limited validity period. If a clock is not set correctly somewhere, those links won’t work, no matter how quickly you get to it.

The Minister of Justice and Security joined the discussion with a striking statement: “Get used to it”, was his much-quoted opinion. This ministry also includes the NCTV (National Coordinator for Terrorism and Security) and the NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre), so it is not just anyone who said this. Should we be concerned about this statement? Some think so, because it would mean that people at the highest levels do not see the seriousness of the situation. I myself think: hey, we have been used to it for a long time already, because things often go wrong and then they are simply fixed. However: most incidents do not have such a big impact. I can think of a few scenarios in our own organisation, for example, which would give us a bit more than the usual headache and could have a significant social impact. We would rather not get used to that.

The NAFIN malfunction had actually already been resolved, but this morning (Friday) it turned out that the airport police is still experiencing problems. If you are going to fly in the coming days, don't forget your passport. Because issuing an emergency passport is not an option for the time being.

 

And in the big bad world…

• Many readers of this article have an opinion about the NAFIN problems. [DUTCH]
• Prime Minister Schoof was not that impressed by the major disruption. [DUTCH]
• Seattle Airport is likely to have suffered a cyber attack.
• this journalist gives an eyewitness account of the situation in Seattle.
• iPhones and iPads crash when you type four specific characters in a row.
• France has arrested the of Telegram’s CEO.
• Signal 's boss was interviewed in the context of the chat app's tenth anniversary.
• It's always a shame when a well-intentioned action strongly resembles phishing.
• you better throw away this security camera.
• a bank employee sold customer data to criminals. [DUTCH]
• Ireland is seeing more and more WhatsApp hacks (and it could happen in your country too).