What Can We Learn About Cybersecurity from the Challenger Disaster? Everything

Understanding the potential threats that your organization faces is an essential part of risk management in modern times. It involves forecasting and evaluating all the factors that impact risk. Processes, procedures and investments can all increase, minimize or even eliminate risk.

Another factor is the human element. Often times, within an organization, a culture exists in which reams of historical data tell one story, but management believes something entirely different. This “cognitive dissonance” can lead to an overemphasis and reliance on near-term data and/or experiences and a discounting of long-term statistical analysis.

Perhaps no better example of this exists than the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, which now serves as a case study in improperly managing risk. In January of that year, the Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after launch due to the failure of a gasket (called an O-ring) in one of the rocket boosters. While the physical cause of the disaster was caused by the failure of the O-ring, the resulting Rogers Commission that investigated the accident found that NASA had failed to correctly identify “flaws in management procedures and technical design that, if corrected, might have prevented the Challenger tragedy.”

Despite strong evidence dating back to 1977 that the O-ring was a flawed design that could fail under certain conditions/temperatures, neither NASA management nor the rocket manufacturer, Morton Thiokol, responded adequately to the danger posed by the deficient joint design. Rather than redesigning the joint, they came to define the problem as an “acceptable flight risk.” Over the course of 24 preceding successful space shuttle flights, a “safety culture” was established within NASA management that downplayed the technical risks associated with flying the space shuttle despite mountains of data, and warnings about the O-ring, provided by research and development (R & D) engineers.

As American physicist Richard Feynman said regarding the disaster, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

Truer words have never been spoken when they pertain to cybersecurity. C-suite executives need to stop evaluating and implementing cybersecurity strategies and solutions that meet minimal compliance and establish a culture of “acceptable risk” and start managing to real-world risks — risks that are supported by hard data.

Risk Management and Cybersecurity

The threat of a cyberattack on your organization is no longer a question of if, but when, and C-suite executives know it. According to C-Suite Perspectives: Trends in the Cyberattack Landscape, Security Threats and Business Impacts, 96% of executives were concerned about network vulnerabilities and security risks resulting from hybrid computing environments. Managing risk requires organizations to plan for and swiftly respond to risks and potential risks as they arise. Cybersecurity is no exception. For any organization, risks can be classified into four basic categories:

The Challenger disaster underscores all four of these risk categories. Take strategic risk as an example. Engineers from Morton Thiokol expressed concerns and presented data regarding the performance of the O-rings, both in the years prior and days leading up to the launch, and stated the launch should be delayed. NASA, under pressure to launch the already delayed mission and emboldened by the 24 preceding successful shuttle flights that led them to discount the reality of failure, pressured Morton Thiokol to supply a different recommendation. Morton Thiokol management decided to place organizational goals ahead of safety concerns that were supported by hard data. The recommendation for the launch was given, resulting in one of the most catastrophic incidents in manned space exploration. Both Morton Thiokol and NASA made strategic decisions that placed the advancements of their respective organizations over the risks that were presented.

This example of strategic risk serves as a perfect analogy for organizations implementing cybersecurity strategies and solutions. There are countless examples of high-profile cyberattacks and data breaches in which upper management was warned in advance of network vulnerabilities, yet no actions were taken to prevent an impending disaster. The infamous 2018 Panera Bread data breach is one such example. Facebook is yet another. Its platform operations manager between 2011 and 2012 warned management at the social tech giant to implement audits or enforce other mechanisms to ensure user data extracted from the social network was not misused by third-party developers and/or systems. These warnings were apparently ignored.

So why does this continually occur? The implementation of DDoS and WAF mitigation solutions often involves three key components within an organization: management, the security team/SOC and compliance. Despite reams of hard data provided by a security team that an organization is either currently vulnerable or not prepared for the newest generation of attack vectors, management will often place overemphasis on near-term security results/experiences; they feel secure in the fact that the organization has never been the victim of a successful cyberattack to date. The aforementioned Facebook story is a perfect example: They allowed history to override hard data presented by a platform manager regarding new security risks.

Underscoring this “cognitive dissonance” is the compliance team, which often seeks to evaluate DDoS mitigation solutions based solely on checkbox functionality that fulfills minimal compliance standards. Alternatively, this strategy also drives a cost-savings approach that yields short-term financial savings within an organization that often times views cybersecurity as an afterthought vis-à-vis other strategic programs, such as mobility, IoT and cloud computing.

The end result? Organizations aren’t managing real-world risks, but rather are managing “yesterday’s” risks, thereby leaving themselves vulnerable to new attack vectors, IoT botnet vulnerabilities, cybercriminals and other threats that didn’t exist weeks or even days ago.