Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 144

virtualization software and potentially mass data breach issues, if an entire
cloud provider's infrastructure is breached” (Gonsalves 2013).
Compounding the problem of hacker attacks is that, for all the charges
and countercharges, there is genuine uncertainty about where they come
from and why. When it appeared that China was going after computers
operated by the company that monitors more than half the oil and gas
pipelines in the United States, the company set out to determine why they
were doing it. Were they interested in bringing down a major piece of
American infrastructure in the event of a military confrontation, or were
they just trolling for secrets to pass on to China's utilities? Six months
after the attack, American oficials claimed that they still did not know.
The same was the case with attacks against ive multinational energy
companies in 2011. They appeared to come from China, but no one
knows for sure and certainly not why. Moreover, U.S. security experts
are uncertain about which is the bigger threat, China or Iran. The latter,
they suspect, continues to work on retaliation for Stuxnet but lacks the
technical sophistication of China. But no one knows whether either is a
primary threat given the number of operations emanating from all over
the world, including from within the United States (Perlroth, Sanger,
and Schmidt 2013). Indeed, given the mountain of revelations about the
NSA, it is reasonable to conclude that the major threat to the privacy of
communication and information in the United States, and perhaps the
world, is the electronic surveillance operations of the NSA, other U.S.
intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, and their partners in the United
Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Bamford 2013).
More than external attacks violate privacy and security. The very act of
maintaining these protections can bring down computers, a demonstration
of the often repeated principle that complex systems fail because they are
complex (Perrow 1999). In order to block unauthorized access to their
cloud services, some companies deploy an https protocol, which requires
regular renewal. In February 2013 Microsoft failed to renew the certii-
cate to run its cloud service Azure, leading to a worldwide shutdown of
its main cloud services. The embarrassing failure kept Azure users from
accessing iles stored in Microsoft's data centers. Even after four hours,
customers were still only able to see the statement “We apologize for any
inconvenience this causes our customers” on the company website (Ribeiro
2013). In this case, systems set up to protect the privacy and security of