Keith Pachulski

The front office found out the network was gone when a parent walked up to the glass and asked to be buzzed back to a classroom. The staff member reached for the button and nothing happened. Then she looked at the bank of monitors that should have shown every hallway and every exterior door, and the monitors were black. She picked up the desk phone to call the assistant principal and there was no dial tone. In the span of a morning a building full of children had lost the ability to see its...

Three hours into the incident, a phone buzzed with a text from a number nobody recognized. The message did not ask for money. It named the chief information security officer's daughter, it named her school, and it gave the time she usually got dropped off in the morning. Then it went back to the ransom. The chief information security officer is the executive who owns security for the whole company, and that person had spent three hours thinking about servers and backups. The text was not...

Picture the operations floor at a busy airport. The radar is up. The radios work. The controllers are at their stations and every system they think of as the job is running exactly like it did yesterday. Then the weather feed goes dark. Not the radar, not the comms, the weather. And without current, trusted weather data, you cannot safely space and sequence aircraft, so the whole operation starts to slow. Ground stops. Holding patterns. Flights backing up across the network because a...