I’ve been a fan and follower for years of the series “24” starring Kiefer Sutherland. The first season was nothing short of amazing, it was absolutely a ground-breaking television series. The action and suspense is always top notch as Kiefer’s character, special agent Jack Bauer, pulls off amazing feats and defies death again and again to save millions of lives from terrorists and rogue forces from around the world. And of course it requires some degree of suspension of disbelief. I’m good with that, though as the series continued over the years, like most series, it’s stretched things further and further and has accordingly become less and less believable. This year, I think they have finally jumped the shark. And as a technologist I’m having a really hard time even watching the show at this point when I try to swallow the storylines they are feeding us.

I’m not even going to dwell on the fact that the beginning of the season featured several shows where terrorists had created a “CIP Device” (I won’t bore anyone here with what a CIP device is, but picture a small piece of hardware that you plug into a network) that gives them absolute access to every government controlled system and allows them to bypass all firewall protections. With ease they begin to take over air traffic control, override safety precautions in chemical plants and according to government officials could take over just about anything. They go on to say that it would take 7 days to restructure their firewalls and security to guard against the device. And since the whole season is supposed to occur within a 24 hour period that definitely presents a problem. Luckily, within a few hours/episodes the device is destroyed. The whole concept that such a device could exist is a bit beyond ridiculous not to mention how easily and quickly they created it. And that doesn’t even take into consideration how preposterous it is that some of the agencies and installations out there are even close to being advanced and well networked enough to be so easily connected to and controlled in the first place by those who are supposed to have such access.

But the most recent episodes didn’t just jump the shark. They circled around and had a pyramid of leather-jacket-clad Fonzies jump 100 meters over an entire school of sharks. In the show, a group of about a dozen terrorist commandos from a fictional small African country called Sengala manage to break into the White House and take the president hostage. To do this they go underwater (in a river about a mile from the White House) and drill a hole to enter the sewer systems, then march right up to underneath the White House where they drill another hole only to be confronted by a series of glowing laser beam motion detectors criss-crossed in front of them. Their “inside guy”, a lowly janitor, then cuts the power to the detection grid so they can rush across the tunnel, emerge on the other side in the White House and begin their assault. Really? I mean… seriously?

At Definition 6 we host and manage web sites for a large portion of our customers, including sites that see hundreds of thousands of users per day and process millions of dollars in transactions each day. Very important stuff, though not even close to the value of the White House and the President of the United States. We have so many different mechanisms in place to guard against power outages (like enterprise class data centers with more power backups than you can shake a stick at including diesel generators that could run for weeks… power isn’t interrupted for more than a millisecond without back-ups kicking in, alerts being shot off and warning boards lighting up like Christmas trees). We have monitoring and alerting systems that tell us the moment a site or system is down and even proactively look for warnings that a system is degrading. We have monitoring systems that monitor our monitoring systems to make sure they are up. Tiny outages launch alerts via several different mechanisms to an army of engineers who receive instant notifications. And even if someone on our own team who has all the needed admin access and knowledge wanted to maliciously take something down and try to obscure this from others it would be amazingly difficult. There would practically need to be collusion amongst all the top engineers with some pretty impressive and clandestine planning – even then they would only be buying themselves minutes. And given the work we’ve done over the past couple of years related to helping our customers with PCI compliance the processes, procedures and training (and in some cases even background checks) we’ve put our teams through and implemented it makes it even more unlikely anything like this could ever happen.

So as much as I love a good action TV show with outlandish plot lines, as soon as you try to make me believe White House security is that poor I’m faced with either having to change the channel, or I need to consider they could be right in which case I’m packing my bags and moving my family to rural Montana to build a bunker. In this case, I think I’m going to put my bunker plans on hold. And for web sites and their security I’m going to keep my faith in the engineering teams of Definition 6. Keep up the great work guys, and maybe we can get you some work as technical plot advisors with the Fox Network. They could definitely use some help.