What the CrowdStrike Outage Taught Us So Far

In this special edition of the ISMG Editors’ Panel, CyberEd Board member Ian Thornton-Trump joined editors to discuss the fallout from the massive CrowdStrike IT outage, the reaction from the tech industry and how we can learn from the incident and create more resilient operations.

“We learned a valuable lesson about the fragility of our infrastructure,” Thornton-Trump said. “We also learned how dangerous – we got a taste of what a global cyberattack would look like … I feel like we are at one of those inflection moments.”

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A faulty update to CrowdStrike Falcon software caused Windows PCs to crash and repeatedly reboot, leading to significant global disruptions for banking customers, hospital patient, airports, government agencies and retail shops. The first step of all affected organizations should be to get “on the phone to your customers, being open and transparent and giving them updates about when your services are going to come back online. This is really the key to handling this right now,” he said.

The panelists – Thornton-Trump, CISO at Cyjax and a CyberEdBoard member; Anna Delaney, director of productions, ISMG; and Mathew Schwartz, executive editor, DataBreachToday and Europe, ISMG – discussed:

• The immediate and long-term effects of the outage on various sectors;
• The response from CrowdStrike and the broader cybersecurity community;
• Strategies for organizations to improve their resilience in the face of similar incidents.

The ISMG Editors’ Panel runs weekly. Don’t miss our previous installments, including the July 12 edition on how we should handle ransomware code flaws and the July 19 edition on how AT&T allegedly paid a ransom in the Snowflake breach.