Government systems are down. ‘This is going to happen more often’

By Elcke Vels

An IT failure at the Ministry of Defense affected several government services. The failure led to problems at emergency services, the Coast Guard, the Royal Netherlands Military Constabulary, DigiD, the Municipal Health Service, and Eindhoven Airport, among others. For some of these services, the problems have been resolved. Cybersecurity expert Patrick Jordens fears many more failures in the coming years.

According to RTL News, the Netherlands Armed Forces Integrated Network (NAFIN) is involved. This network is crucial and heavily secured for the Dutch government. The network includes more than 3,000 kilometers of fiber optic cables and supports essential government tasks. It ensures that ministries, emergency services, and Defense sites can communicate effectively with each other.

Jordens, director of Trusted Third Party (TT3P), a Dutch company specializing in cybersecurity, explains how so many organizations can be affected at the same time. “Government services often work with the same systems, which increases the chance that if one service experiences a failure, it will also affect other services. We saw this phenomenon earlier this year during a major outage at Microsoft, where many organizations were also down at the same time.”

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Human error

A cyber attack cannot be ruled out, but a technical failure is most likely this time, says Defense Minister Brekelmans. Whatever the cause, chances are that it is human error, according to Jordens. In the case of a cyberattack, that’s obvious. “An interesting question here is: who is behind it? It could be a state actor rather than a ransomware group demanding a ransom. Russia, for example, an attack on Dutch defense systems would be valuable.”

But in many cases, technical failures are also the result of human error. “For example, because an important update was not implemented, or because an update was implemented, but in the wrong way,” Jordens explains.

‘Going to happen more often’

The cybersecurity expert fears that we will experience large-scale failures more often in the future. “Our dependence on technology is rapidly increasing, which only increases the impact of failures and system failures. We are reaping the benefits of technology, but we also need to be aware of our vulnerability.”