5 things to learn from the CrowdStrike IT outage

The CrowdStrike IT outage crippled airlines and stranded passengers. Potentially more seriously, it also halted important medical procedures at hospitals, cancer centers and blood banks. Emergency response services in some communities and public transportation in Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania went down. 

While the damage may have looked like a cyberattack at first, it wasn’t one. Instead, a widely trusted cybersecurity company’s insufficiently vetted update caused it to achieve the equivalent of an own goal.

Yet the CrowdStrike IT outage also presents a teachable moment. Here are five things business leaders and other professionals should learn from it.

Lesson #1: America Is Increasingly Vulnerable

According to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, the cause of the outage was “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.” While his use of the adjective “single” might have been intended to downplay the severity of the issue, this comment actually shines a bright light on just how vulnerable companies, organizations and the public at large are in this era of frequent software updates.

Users are accustomed to being required to update their systems multiple times a year, if not more frequently. As technology gets more complex, however, updating that technology becomes riskier. The more connected the technology is, combined with the escalating risk factor, the more likely public outages become.

This problem isn’t going to go away. Indeed, it’s likely to get worse.

Lesson #2: IT Vulnerabilities Are a National Security Problem

The CrowdStrike IT outage demonstrates how quickly damage can ripple throughout our entire society. By paralyzing healthcare, transportation and emergency response, it showed the potential consequences for not only the corporate sector but also national security.

Today, most authorities only consider public utilities like water, gas and the electric grid to be critical infrastructure. Instead, we should consider anything that is connected to the public at large as such, including operating systems like Windows and MacOS and security systems like Crowdstrike or Sentinel One.

To read the complete article, visit IoT World Today.