In 1989 the thin-hulled Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, pouring a quarter of a million barrels of oil into the surrounding waters. The firm paid $3bn to clean up the area and settle legal claims, and to improve safety the American government ordered the phasing out of single-hull ships such as Exxon Valdez. But that is not all. The disaster gave rise to a cultlike culture of discipline within ExxonMobil that helped turn it into the profitmaking beast it is today.
Three decades later, as a result of a relentless surge in cybercrime, digital firms are floundering towards their own Exxon Valdez moment. The latest is Capital One, a big American bank with a market capitalisation of $42bn, which on July 29th revealed that a hacker had stolen personal and financial details of 106m credit-card customers and applicants.
The incident has two parallels with the oil industry. “The Fifth Domain”, a new book on the subject, describes the way the hacker penetrated a layer of security called a web-application firewall as a “perfect analogy” to the era of single-hulled oil tankers.
