Natural Disasters
Nobody can stop nature from taking its course. Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, lightning, and fire can cause severe damage to computer systems. Information can be lost, downtime or loss of productivity can occur, and damage to hardware and other essential services can be disrupted.
Few safeguards can be implemented against natural disasters. The best course of action is to have disaster-recovery and contingency plans in place. These will help an organization restore itself to normal business operations.
Riots, wars, and terrorist attacks, although the result of human activity, fall into this category because they are seen as disasters and are difficult to protect against with computer security policies and controls.