Early Friday morning. businesses, airports, media companies and other companies that rely on CrowdStrike, the world’s largest cybersecurity company, for cybersecurity services experienced outages.
Many workers saw what’s referred to as the “blue screen of death,” which has an error message and a frowned face.
CrowdStrike said the mass outage was caused by a flawed routine software update the company deployed in an effort to keep their customers safe from hackers.
CrowdStrike said a defect in one of its updates for computers running the Windows operating system caused the issue. This caused what is arguably the largest global information technology outage in history.
Dr. Frederick Scholl, director of the Cybersecurity Program at Quinnipiac University, said the system did the opposite of what it’s made to do.
“It’s designed to detect malware and then report if there are any types of attacks, and they’re probably the leading company in this field. So, a lot of businesses and agencies, as you were talking about, use this software. Consumers don’t use it, so we won’t see that,” he explained.
Scholl, who is also an associate teaching professor of cybersecurity at Quinnipiac, said this outage concerns him for the future as it exposed a vulnerability for hackers.
“Believe me, all the hackers around the world are looking at this and they’re trying to say, ‘How can we use this?’ kind of. It’s a vulnerability, right? They’re trying to figure out how can we use this kind of vulnerability to take advantage of it. So, we don’t know if that will happen now or it might happen a year from now,” he said.
He added that the outage reveals how much companies, including emergency services, law enforcement and governmental agencies rely on CrowdStrike for protection from cyber threats.
“So, people just need to be more aware that we think all these great services that we use are 100% reliable. They’re not. So, you know, have some cash. Your ATM machine may go down, so just think through what you do and what will you do if that service isn’t working,” Scholl added.
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