Hi everyone.
Today I am learning that risk = vulnerability + threat
I am trying to understand how the risk is defined in the case of a global service outage.
Example: CloudFlare is out. This obviously has a big operational and reputational impact.
So this makes me think: an outage is a risk (ex. DoS) - what could be the possible vulnerability and threat related to that?
Let’s say that the vulnerability is a CVE related to Denial of Service or loss of Availability - what is the threat here? If this is a crash of a sub-provider - what kind fo threat is this?
Thank you in advance for helping me understand
For my part, I would frame it this way.
Assuming the example of yesterday’s Cloudflare outage…
The Risk is a disruption of Availability, which as you note carries considerable operational and reputational impact, as well as financial impact if that disruption carries penalties in an SLA.
Now, the outage has been resolved, per Cloudflare says outage that hit X, ChatGPT and other sites is resolved
This article notes that the root cause was explained as follows “A Cloudflare spokesperson said the “root cause” of the outage was an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic that “grew beyond an expected size of entries,” which triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for several of its services.”
So in this case the threat is the exceedingly large configuration file that caused the crash, while the vulnerability is the fact that the downstream traffic handling system lacked proper size validation, resource constraints, or other failsafe mechanisms.