Looking Back at 2021 - Cybersecurity, supply chains, and biomedical engineering

By ASCF Senior Fellow Scott Tilley

December 17, 2021 - Back in January, I wrote a column called “Looking Ahead to 2021,” where I identified three areas that I thought would be crucial technical power topics in the coming year: cybersecurity, supply chains, and biomedical engineering. Of course, as with all forecasts, sometimes the predictions are correct, but all too often, they are wrong. This year was no different. (That won’t stop me from writing a similar column for 2022.)

As we close out the year, I thought it would be prudent to revisit these three topics and examine the developments in each. There is little doubt that they will continue influencing society next year, but exactly how remains unclear. What is clear is that, for better and for worse, rapid developments in these areas seem unstoppable.

***

Cybersecurity: I wrote about the SolarWinds hack back in February. It was the worse cybersecurity breach in US history, affecting over 18,000 clients of the Austin-based company. It was an incredibly complex attack, so stealthy that it went unnoticed for over ten months before a cybersecurity firm detected that itself was infected. It still affects many systems; it’s hard to untangle the hack from the proper code. It seems hackers from eastern Europe were behind the attack, and it’s also possible a hostile nation-state supported them.

Sadly, SolarWinds was not the only example of cybersecurity attacks in 2021; there were plenty more, mostly ransomware. I wrote about this in July. Hospitals, schools, and oil refineries are some of the examples of organizations that were infected with malware and held for ransom (usually payable in untraceable digital currencies like Bitcoin) around the world. Colonial Pipeline paid $5 million to restore their systems (the FBI was later able to recover $2.3 million of the payment). Unfortunately, ransomware has become big business.

More recently, articles have been circulated about a zero-day exploit in log4j, a Java-based logging program that is commonly used in millions of computer servers running the open-source Apache software. This exploit is so serious that pundits have described the situation as “The Internet is on fire.” CNN reported that “As of Tuesday, more than 100 hacking attempts were occurring per minute, according to data this week from cybersecurity firm Check Point.” Most major companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Minecraft, use log4j somewhere in their computer systems. They are now scrambling to try and patch the problem. The weaponization of these software vulnerabilities is a huge black-market industry – one that we will find increasingly difficult to counter in the coming years.

***

Supply Chains: When the COVID-19 pandemic began, severe problems with our supply chains were quickly made apparent. For example, we lacked quality Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) since (ironically) most of it came from China. In addition, many countries were dependent on other nations for vaccines since they could not manufacture their own. Global supply chains were gradually introduced when just-in-time manufacturing and off-shoring became popular. They can be cost-efficient, but as the pandemic has shown, they are not very resilient. Thankfully, there has been a movement to “reshore” manufacturing, which might be more costly, but it would mean essential parts of our economy would again be under our control. Technology, automation, and artificial intelligence will play a significant role in this welcome movement.

Supply chain issues were not limited to healthcare. For example, car manufacturers have been hit with a microchip shortage, making their manufacturing more challenging. Some of the major automobile companies have idled shifts and placed partly built cars in storage as they wait for the electronic components essential to the modern automobile. Again, this would not be such a problem if the chips were made here, but for the most part, they’re not. Most are made in places like China and Taiwan. Since these chips are also used in many other products that our modern economy relies upon, it’s clearly a national security problem that the administration should address.

There’s also a human element to the supply chain crisis: a labor shortage. For example, there are dozens of cargo ships waiting off the California coast to gain access to the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. They are stuck at sea because there is a shortage of workers to unload the containers, and a shortage of truck drivers to move the containers from the port to their final destination, either on the highway or by rail connections. The problem appears to be resolving itself, but it should never have occurred in the first place. There has been a direct impact on various sectors of our economy because of these shortages, due in part to our massive amount of imported goods that contribute to our trade imbalance with countries who don’t always have our best interests at heart.

***

Biomedical Engineering: By far, the most important advancement in biotechnology in 2021 was the rapid development and deployment of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna (which technically started in late 2020). Research into these sophisticated and programmable mRNA vaccines had been underway for over a decade, but the speed with which these vaccines were tailored to the novel coronavirus was unprecedented. If these vaccines were not available so soon, we’d be in much worse shape vis-a-vis the pandemic. Unfortunately, the Delta strain is still circulating, and the highly contagious Omicron variant seems more resistant to the vaccines. Still, it appears that two shots plus a booster protect most people from serious illness and hospitalization.

I received my first jab at the Mayo Clinic on February 27. My second shot was at CVS on March 22. Finally, I had the booster at CVS on August 27. I was able to get the first shot quite early because I am one of the millions of Americans who are immunocompromised. I wish everyone would choose to be fully vaccinated because it is not just a matter of personal health: it’s a matter of national security. If a significant portion of the population became ill, our health care systems would become overwhelmed, and our economy would crater. Moreover, it would present an opportunity for foreign powers to take advantage of our precarious situation.

We are fortunate to have an abundance of vaccines in this country, but it’s not like that in other parts of the world. This discrepancy has given rise to “vaccine nationalism,” which is unfortunate for everyone. The World Health Organization (WHO) is fond of saying that we’ll all be at risk until everyone is vaccinated (or has developed natural immunity to the coronavirus). The new variants that are circling the globe right now all come from countries with a much lower vaccination rate, so there is some truth to the WHO’s statement. For many developing countries, it’s not a problem of lack of vaccine supply, but poor logistics to distribute the vaccine to their population. Perhaps new forms of vaccines that are currently undergoing trials, such as pills and nasal sprays, will change the equation.

– END –