The Modern Ice Age: How the Events That Paralyze the World Happen
It was the modern glacier. Ziarul Financiar analyzes the events that paralyze the world and leave millions of people who were dependent on technology completely on the outside.
The global IT industry came close to a catastrophe after millions of computers crashed globally, knocking out critical infrastructure in hospitals, banks, airports or government services and causing panic and chaos just two months ago. The IT outage was caused by a trivial software update by Crowdstrike – a key cybersecurity provider for the global business elite – which instantly hit all Microsoft Windows-based computing systems. Andrei Avădanei, the CEO of the cybersecurity company Bit Sentinel, is of the opinion that this episode is caused by the lack of exigency on the part of the companies in terms of following the necessary steps to carry out the updates.
“There is a need for stricter compliance with the update protocol at the level of organizations and better control within companies over those updates, so that they are not done automatically by the supplier. I don’t release updates throughout the organization, I don’t release them on equipment automatically. I choose a subset of the entire organization where I update for the first time, I wait 24 hours or 72 hours, it depends on how the internal procedure is, and only after that I start to continue the update process in the entire network” said Andrei Avădănei, CEO of Bit cybersecurity company Sentinel, at ZF Live.
The CrowdStrike episode also has consequences that are less visible at first glance. The CEO of Bit Sentinel points out that the collapse of the IT systems behind Crowstrike could directly affect companies’ confidence in their cybersecurity solutions, which opens the door to more vulnerabilities in the future.
“Our perspective is that it will create a challenge to promote these solutions as easily, because everyone will ask the question: “OK, if I install my security agent, how do I know that I don’t suffer a similar situation as was it the case last week?”. On the other hand, there is a discussion of responsibility and liability, and the question is “who should be responsible for this failure in checking the update?”, it’s about Crowdstrike, it’s about the user of the solution who, as I said, did not comply those intermediate steps to validate the update?” Bit Sentinel CEO also said at ZF Live.
Source: www.mediafax.ro
