For the second time this month, a serious computer failure has disrupted air travel in the US. In the first instance two Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) computers that handled all domestic flight plans failed. And on Wednesday, the United Airlines computer system that runs flight operations went down. In both cases, back-up systems installed for just such a primary failure did not kick in automatically. This is by no means the first time that part or all of airline computers have fallen over and not been replaced immediately by reserve computers. Airline passengers can therefore with justice be asking themselves how safe “fail-safe systems” really are? Indeed it is not just those who fly. Computers now underpin the greater part of life all over the world. They run banks, stock exchanges, oil fields, refineries, traffic lights and nuclear power stations. They even run the electricity grids without which they themselves cannot operate. And when they do not work, it is not necessarily mere inconvenience they cause. In the case of something like a nuclear power station, a failure could be catastrophic.
Computers may do clever things but they are also stupid, in that they will only ever do what they have been programmed to do. Thus in the 1987 stock market crash, much of the slide in prices was due to computers. Brokers thought that they could make more money by automating their trades, so they could execute buy or sell orders in a split second. Thus when the world’s stock markets began to slide, the falling prices triggered a tidal wave of computer-generated sell orders, which drove down prices that in turn triggered yet more automated sales. The computers were only doing what they had been told to do, but they brought ruin to millions of investors. There is however a greater danger to failing computers and that is from the evil forces of international terror. There is no such thing as a totally safe computer system, since every one of them must have a point where programmers can enter it to make changes and upgrades. Besides which, the majority of computer systems take information from other computers, often from all over the world. Those links are vulnerable. A determined terrorist could break in and using sophisticated software to crack passwords and identities, triggering a disaster, for the markets, the banking system, for airlines or a nuclear power station.
And it might not indeed merely be terrorists. The Russians have used hackers to disrupt computer systems in countries with which they have been in dispute. Most recently, Latvian government websites were brought down in a data overload attack that came from Russia. The message therefore is clear. The present concept of computer security is probably inadequate to combat the rising threat to networks. Back-up systems are clearly not fail-safe and must be strengthened and multiplied. But perhaps the greatest risk to the computers that run our world is the loss of electrical power. They may have been slow, but pen and ink were infinitely safer.
