The biggest concern is the hospital industry
The world came to a halt after a technology outage reported Thursday grounded planes, knocked power out to hospitals and closed banks around the world. The cause was a glitch in a software update, not cybercriminals. Still, TJ O’Connor, an assistant professor at Florida Institute of Technology, said the cascading effects of the outage point to larger concerns about our society’s reliance on the internet. (Florida Tech photo)
BREVARD COUNTY • MELBOURNE, FLORIDA – The world came to a standstill after a reported technical outage grounded planes, knocked power out to hospitals and closed banks around the world on Thursday.
Although the culprit wasn’t cybercriminals, but a faulty software update, TJ O’Connor, an assistant professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, said the cascading effects of the outage point to larger concerns about our society’s reliance on the internet.
The outage, which affected users’ access to Microsoft 365 applications, was traced to a flaw found in a software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which quickly released a statement confirming that the outage was “not the result of a security incident or cyberattack.”
Still, the outage did damage and took the agency offline, with the problems persisting for several hours.
“When these services stop, the knock-on effects are enormous,” O’Connor said. “If banking doesn’t work, aviation doesn’t work. If aviation doesn’t work, shipping doesn’t work.”
Ultimately, O’Connor explained, the biggest concern isn’t system failure, but the number of systems that failed because CrowdStrike didn’t work.
“I think the lesson for a lot of people from this CrowdStrike incident is that in the future, if you want to take down the internet, you only need to attack one target,” O’Connor said. “This makes the threat surface for adversaries much smaller.”
For hours, Microsoft’s blue error screen plagued businesses around the world. Airlines including Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and Frontier Airlines grounded all flights. Several TV news stations, including Britain’s Sky News, were unable to broadcast live news.
O’Connor noted the greatest concerns lie in the hospital industry, where planning, evaluation and ongoing monitoring are essential.
“When these services go down, the cascading effects are enormous,” said TJ O’Connor, an assistant professor at Florida Institute of Technology. “If banking doesn’t work, aviation doesn’t work. If aviation doesn’t work, shipping doesn’t work.” (Image from Florida Institute of Technology)
“[Hospitals] “The network is constantly processing huge amounts of data, and having it down for a few hours means that decisions are not being made automatically,” O’Connor said. “We rely on automated systems to make a lot of our decisions, so we can’t allow the network to go down.”
According to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), the outage disrupted systems for booking appointments and patient records. Massachusetts General Hospital Brigham in Boston, Massachusetts, was one of several US hospitals to cancel non-urgent surgeries, procedures and appointments due to the outage.
911 outages were also reported in several states, including Phoenix, Arizona, where the city’s computer communications center was affected, according to police department social media posts. In Portland, Oregon, Mayor Ted Wheeler declared a citywide state of emergency after an outage affected city servers, computers and emergency communications.
CrowdStrike acknowledged the incident was not malicious, but O’Connor said it raises questions about the overall reliance on the internet for decision-making and the inefficiency of securing the internet.
“There’s always a wake-up call where something happens, it’s big, it makes the news, and then we forget about it. But our adversaries don’t forget,” O’Connor said. “Unfortunately, the attack infrastructure and the capabilities are becoming easier.”
O’Connor also expects network attacks to get worse in the future, calling the unstable global environment a “nation-level problem that needs to be addressed.”
O’Connor said that while large-scale attacks and outages are often outside of an individual’s control, individuals can take steps to protect themselves from personal cybersecurity attacks by using multi-factor authentication wherever possible.
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