According to security experts, today’s IT outage was caused by an update to Falcon antivirus software by Crowdstrike. George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, confirmed that the issue was not a security incident or cyber attack and has been resolved with a fix deployed. However, it has been warned that there is no quick fix and several IT experts have given their opinions on the matter.
Mark Grindey, CEO of Zeus Cloud, stated that adequate testing for updates should be done in a safe environment before issuing them company-wide and companies should never have auto-updates set in a live environment. He emphasised that this global outage highlights the need for businesses to not blindly trust their suppliers when it comes to updates before testing first. The only fix is to reboot in safe mode and remove the faulty file, which must be done manually and takes time.
Mark Jow, EMEA technical lead and security evangelist at Gigamon, called for more robust and resilient solutions, suggesting that every IT and security vendor must have a robust system in place across its software development lifecycle to test upgrades before they are rolled out to ensure that there are no flaws in the updates.
Jeff Watkins, chief product and technology officer at CreateFuture, felt that today’s IT outage was likely due to a problem with Crowdstrike’s Falcon Sensor software, which could have affected Microsoft’s own estate. Whilst remedial steps have been published to recover machines, putting millions of Windows machines into recovery mode takes time, making this one of the biggest IT outages in recent history.
Iain James, computer systems manager at care management software provider Fusion eCare Solutions, highlighted the global dependence on IT infrastructure, stressing the urgent need for diversification and resilience in our technological backbone. He believes this incident serves as a wakeup call for the industry to reassess security protocols and examine how to safeguard our digital world.
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