Massive Crowdstrike Microsoft Outage Takes Down Countless Devices

That massive cyber outage causing problems for banks, airlines, hospitals. Joining us now is cybersecurity expert Robert Siciliano from ProtectNow to talk about the potential impacts. Robert, welcome to Boston 25 News.

Good morning, thank you.

We've been talking about this company CrowdStrike. I'm curious, what exactly does this company do and how many other companies use it?

So CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity firm, uh, and they work with, uh, various corporations and organizations to mitigate risk., and, uh, their job in regards to this particular outage, uh, is to in fact mitigate and find out what the problem is.

Uh, we know that the CEO has apologized already this morning in a news interview. Sounds like this was some sort of software upgrade glitch. I'm not a technical expert, so correct me if that's wrong, but how does something like this happen and why does it seem to take so long to fix?

Yeah, so the, the main issue here is like, for example, you know, you, we, we update our operating system on our PCs and laptops all the time, right? Sometimes automatically, sometimes manually. And Microsoft put out an update that was flawed, and that flawed update went out onto the networks, onto various PCs and servers and such, and it caused a problem. It caused a functionality issue. So Microsoft ultimately was part of the problem here, and essentially it's similar to getting bad gas in your vehicle, and your vehicle doesn't operate properly, therefore various networks and computers don't operate properly.

So here in Boston, obviously it's not just flight delays. We've talked about hospitals having to cancel surgeries. New Hampshire was without 911 service for a time overnight. I'm curious, what do you think will or should be the ramifications from this event? And between CrowdStrike and Microsoft, who's responsible?

Yeah, you know, ultimately I think the buck stops with Microsoft. And, you know, there likely will be no repercussions whatsoever. I mean, more than likely, like, you know, Congress is going to raise their arms and say, hey, how can we prevent this in the future? And the And the reality is, is that we rely on technology to such a high degree that all our critical infrastructures are directly affected by it. Hospitals, fuel, energy, everything. And more than likely, they just need to put more backups to their backups in order to mitigate that risk in the future.

It amazes me, and I think so many other people, that what seems like one glitch can cascade, have this domino effect that takes out so many different industries and things that we rely on every day. I'm curious, what should we expect for the rest of this day? Is the worst behind us or what's the cleanup, I guess, for this look like?

So I would say that Microsoft and CrowdStrike, they are scrambling as we speak. You know, they do know what they're doing despite the, the error or issue that has occurred. Ultimately, we will come to resolution. This isn't the first time something like this has happened and it won't be the last. And the fact is, due to the fact that this was an error, created by companies that are responsible for deploying functional software, think about how bad it could possibly be if it was an actual cyberattack using similar processes. So what I tell my, you know, clients is that make sure you have backup food, backup water, backup cash, because we rely on the grid to such a degree that if it was to go down for any timeframe, that we would all be at a significant disadvantage.

Yeah, for as inconvenient as this has been, at least it's only been an inconvenience and not something, right, more significant or serious today. Cybersecurity expert Robert Siciliano from ProtectNow joining us this morning for some additional context and perspective on this event. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your expertise.