Outages can disrupt security tools and critical services, showing how failures in infrastructure, vendors, or recovery plans affect cyber resilience.
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Background for this topic.
Outage is a period when a system, network, application, or online service is unavailable or cannot perform its intended function. It may be planned maintenance or an unplanned disruption caused by equipment or software failure, misconfiguration, a dependency problem, natural hazards, or a denial-of-service attack. The tag generally concerns availability incidents, not every performance issue or security breach.
For security practitioners, an outage requires determining whether malicious activity contributed to the disruption while preserving relevant logs, network telemetry, and system state for investigation. Defenses include capacity planning, segmented and redundant architecture, tested failover and recovery procedures, and controls that limit the effect of DDoS traffic or compromised dependencies. Emergency changes made during recovery should be authorized and recorded, since they can create new vulnerabilities or affect data integrity. Clear incident ownership and communications help coordinate technical response without obscuring the cause or scope.
More than 600,000 small office/home office (SOHO) routers are estimated to have been bricked and taken offline following a destructive cyber attack staged by unidentified cyber actors, disrupting users' access to the internet
A malware botnet named 'Pumpkin Eclipse' performed a mysterious destructive event in 2023 that took 600,000 office/home office (SOHO) internet routers offline, according to a new report by researchers at Lumen's Black Lotus Labs. [...]
A malware botnet named 'Pumpkin Eclipse' performed a mysterious destructive event in 2023 that took 600,000 office/home office (SOHO) internet routers offline, according to a new report by researchers at Lumen's Black Lotus Labs. [...]
Even the Threat of Disruption Plays Into Attackers' Hands, Says Ian Thornton-TrumpDefenders of operational technology environments should look beyond the technical controls and incident response plans they've put in place. They also need to consider how attackers might undermine confidence in the service itself, says Ian Thornton-Trump, CISO of Cyjax.
Medical Staff Says Resorting to Manual, Paper Charting Is Posing Risks to PatientsA local union representing medical professionals at an Ascension hospital in Michigan is demanding the organization take actions to protect patient safety in the wake of a cyberattack that took out electronic health records, forcing clinicians to use manual processes and paper charts.