Are we too reliant on the programs impacted by the Microsoft outage?
BOSTON - Cybersecurity experts suggest this could be the biggest tech outage in history. Thousands of flights grounded and medical surgeries halted, including here in Massachusetts, as global antivirus firm CrowdStrike works to get their system fully operational again.
National security risk exposed?
"One flaw or potentially any type of malicious activity in that supply chain of that software can cause absolute chaos and havoc on critical infrastructures globally," said Peter Tran, the Chief Information Security Officer of Infersight.
Tran explains much of the nation and the world rely on software like CrowdStrike to detect suspicious activity, stopping it at the source. When that system takes a hit, business is paralyzed.
"It's very alarming because it shows how dependent critical infrastructure and systems such as transportation, communications, banking, healthcare has on the supply chain and vendors such as CrowdStrike," Tran said.
CrowdStrike's CEO maintains this wasn't a cyberattack, but a bug in the program update impacting many Microsoft users.
WBZ-TV security analyst Ed Davis says the outage exposes a major national security risk.
"When the system goes down, when you're trying to fix it, you're vulnerable to nation-state interference and other things that could have happened," Davis told WBZ-TV. "So a bad guy can exploit the vulnerability very quickly and create problems even bigger than the programming error."
Simply put, we don't know how much of our nation's data is fully protected until the system is fully operating again.
How to prevent future outages
"Well the good news is that most systems have other protections in place such as firewalls and other perimeters," Tran added. "CrowdStrike just happened to be the most disruptive."
While no technology is foolproof, experts suggest having more than one antivirus system could prevent another widespread outage.
"If the best drops and you don't have them and you don't have anybody else, you're in trouble," Davis said. "But the overall vulnerability, the fact that you put all your eggs in one basket for instance, might be something we need to take a look at."
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