Elements of Friday’s global IT outage, which grounded planes and affected services from banking to healthcare, have happened before, and until more contingencies are built into networks and organizations put better backup plans in place, it will happen again.
Friday’s outage was caused by an update that US cyber security firm CrowdStrike sent to its clients early Friday morning, which conflicted with Microsoft’s Windows operating system and left devices around the world inoperable.
CrowdStrike has one of the largest shares of the highly competitive cybersecurity market that provides such tools.
But the outage also raised concerns among experts that many organizations are not well prepared to implement contingency plans when a single point of failure, such as an IT system or piece of software within it, fails.
At the same time, more solvable digital disasters are also looming on the horizon, with perhaps the world’s biggest global IT challenge since the Millennium Bug, “Problem 2038,” less than 14 years away, and this time the world is infinitely more so. addicted to computers.
“It’s easy to jump to the idea that it’s catastrophic and therefore suggest that there needs to be a more diverse market and in an ideal world we should,” said Ciaran Martin, former head of Britain’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), which is part of the country’s GCHQ intelligence agency.
“We’re actually good at managing the safety aspects of technology when it comes to cars, trains, planes and machinery. What we are bad at is providing services,” he added.
“Look at what happened to the London health system a few weeks ago – they were hacked and it led to a lot of canceled operations, which is physically dangerous,” he said, referring to the recent ransomware incident that hit Britain’s National Health Service (NHS).
Organizations need to take a look at their IT systems, Martin said, and ensure those systems have enough security features and redundant systems to remain operational in the event of an outage.