TAMPA, Fla. — Impacts of a global technology outage could be felt far and wide, causing thousands of canceled flights and tens of thousands more delayed around the world. The outage also disrupted hospitals, government offices and banks.
“It is very rare for the application of one of these patches to create this level of disruption,” said Ian Marlow, CEO of Fitech.
The technology meltdown stemmed from a faulty software update issued by major cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and affected customers running Microsoft Windows. According to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, it was not the result of hacking or a cyberattack.
“Think of their software as firewall, intrusion detection system and antivirus all rolled into one and these large corporations use that to protect their systems,” said Thomas Hyslip, cybersecurity expert and University of South Florida assistant professor.
Microsoft said in a statement it was taking "mitigation action" to deal with "the lingering impact" of the outage. Hyslip explained it’s an easy fix but applying it takes time.
“Very simple. Boot the computer into safe mode, go into the CrowdStrike software, delete the one file they identified as a problem. Reboot the computer and it’s fixed,” said Hyslip.
The issue is raising the question how can one cybersecurity software update affect so many crucial global systems?
“What happens is we are heavily, heavily reliant on these very large companies to provide these services. There is certainly more than one that provides these services,” said Marlow.
The cybersecurity expert said firms like CrowdStrike are crucial in safeguarding companies' critical systems; however, it’s the application of the software updates that is causing the issue. He said updates should be run in house on a test server before being pushed out.
“I think there is going to be a post review of where the quality control fell down, where this application happened and how it was automatically pushed out, that it affected things on such an absolute global basis,” Marlow said.
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