What the First Moon Landing Teaches Us About Cyber Security
Today is July 21, 2022, the 53rd anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepping foot on the moon—while Michael Collins maintained the spacecraft in lunar orbit. It was a momentous day in human history!
238,900 miles away on Earth, millions of spectators from around the globe tuned in to their televisions to watch whatever broadcast was transmitted.
From start to finish, the nearly decade-long push to land human beings on the lunar surface for the first time outside of a movie studio was rife with challenges, doubters, and the specter of impossibility. Yet those involved persisted.
As the Apollo 11 craft was engaging its landing sequence, Neil Armstrong reportedly spoke two words to Mission Control: “Program alarm.” Not what you want to hear or say or experience when you’ve finally made it to the moon! Communication channels were unclear, the computer was malfunctioning, and no one was quite sure what was going to happen as lives hang in the balance…
We’re telling this story of the Apollo 11 moon landing because, as you should have expected, there are some key similarities between the events of July 21, 1969, and our modern times.
From the July 16, 1969 launch, the Apollo 11 mission was a 24x7 event; before that moment, NASA indicates some 400,000 people had a hand in making the moon landing possible. These individuals and their respective teams had to ensure precise calculations, communicate with clarity, and consider every contingency with plans for remediation. At the moment when something was going wrong, inaction could prove itself to be a devastating decision.
Meanwhile in 2022, SpearTip’s team of engineers is hard at work 24×7x365 in our US-based Security Operations Center (SOC) even when not actively responding to an in-progress breach or attempted intrusion. The team busily monitors partner networks for suspicious activity, gathers the latest threat intelligence from the dark web, reconfigures toolsets to remain ahead of threat actor movement, collects payloads, and analyzes actions being taken by threat actors in a bulk scenario in search of indicators of compromise (IoCs) in various environments. From this research and insight, they build a response playbook allowing our incident response team to provide clients resources as we review and protect their machines prior to any potential impact. Unlike some of our competitors, our team does not rely solely on automation doing its job flawlessly all the time.
SpearTip's approach allows our team to be proactive in providing security and remediate any malicious activity before threats actualize in an environment. After all, an effective response is not made in the moment; a lot of front-end work must go into it.
The Apollo 11 computer is registering error code “1202”, which basically means the computer is overwhelmed and would like to reboot and start the landing process all over. The technology, considered the most modern and sophisticated of the day, could not handle all the data it was receiving. This is when human intuition, situational awareness, and deep confidence inspired by rigorous training and experience kicked in to save the day!
The trio of astronauts, determined to complete the mission, remained calm amid the chaos. Armstrong engaged manual control of the landing, maneuvered to a smooth spot of moon, glanced at a gauge indicating low fuel, and soon declared “…the Eagle has landed.”
The Apollo 11 landing is like SpearTip’s SOC team’s response to active ransomware: the proactive measures taken allow for a consistent and level-headed reaction by experienced and dedicated humans to ensure the total safety of partner data and networks.
Reflecting on the aforementioned events, the SpearTip team has reaffirmed our belief in and commitment to providing 24×7 proactive intelligence gathering, active network monitoring, and real-time threat remediation to our partners.
With SpearTip, Houston—and every place we have a partner—will not have a problem.