IT outage has ‘caused what is an absolutely unprecedented global outage’ – London Business News | Londonlovesbusiness.com

The IT outage is that “unprecedented” it has caused the world to stop as businesses, airlines, rail, banks and stock exchanges have all been affected.

Experts have voiced their concerns which has shown just how reliant the world is on certain operating systems.

Cybersecurity company Crowdstrike provides cyber-attack monitoring protection for global businesses.

PA media reported that this could make companies globally rethink their overreliance on some IT systems, said cybersecurity expert Dr Harjinder Lallie.

Dr Lallie said it seems the IT outage was caused by a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”

Dr Lallie who is the associate professor at the University of Warwick he said, “The worldwide IT outage experienced this morning is unprecedented in the range and scale of systems it has impacted.”

He added, “This IT ‘catastrophe’ highlights the need for greater resilience, a greater focus on back-up systems, and possibly even a need to rethink whether we are using the most resilient operating systems for such critical systems.”

Dr Lallie told the PA news agency, “We have here a particular combination of tools – an operating system and a tool at the other end and once you put those combinations together you suddenly find that it’s impacting a lot of systems. There is an over-reliance on a) Microsoft b) in this case CrowdStrike at the other end.

“Somewhere between the two there’s been a problem which has caused what is an absolutely unprecedented global outage.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before. We had the NHS, WannaCry (ransomware attack), that was serious. But this is planes, TV stations, it’s such a massive impact.”

He added, “We didn’t know how exposed we were until this happened. Now it’s happened we’re tracing it back and realising ‘crikey, how much reliance we have on these two systems’.”

He continued, “Windows is brilliant, Microsoft is brilliant but there are other operating systems that we could be using in certain mission-critical systems and companies need to think very carefully about, in this particular scenario, is Microsoft the best option or should we actually take the plunge and go with another operating system?

“I don’t know if those conversations are being had or if we are, excuse the term, being lazy and just sticking with Microsoft because we know Microsoft really well.”

Professor Ciaran Martin, who was the founding chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme, “So if a company is using both CrowdStrike and Windows for its operating system, it seems that they get what people in the trade call the ‘blue screen of death’, and Windows doesn’t work.

“And that’s why airlines aren’t able to process, presumably why Sky hasn’t been able to broadcast. It’s also why just simply for timezone reasons it seems to be emerging first in Australia.”