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From airlines to banks and car dealers, a series of outages and cyberattacks in recent months left the public struggling to access services for days.
Cybersecurity experts say it should be a “wake-up call” about our reliance on big tech companies – sometimes individual brands that play a central role in how companies operate.
Less than two weeks ago, thousands of flights were canceled, hospitals were delayed, and bank payment systems in some countries were affected. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike reported that there was a problem with a faulty update. Last Thursday, the problem was caused by a bug in the company’s quality control mechanism.
Customers of many North American auto dealers also faced problems signing for new loans or filling out other paperwork after CDK Global, a supplier of key software, suffered a cyberattack late last month that knocked its widely used system offline for days.
Levent Ertaul, a cybersecurity professor at California State University East Bay, told Global News that these kinds of impacts demonstrate the vulnerabilities that arise when one system or software becomes the default.
“In one day we saw the impact of a single mistake on the fundamentals of the global economy,” he said. “It showed us how dependent we are on those technologies, and also how vulnerable we are … to that single mistake.”
The CrowdStrike update affected many Windows computers, which when the update was released led to the ever-dreaded “blue screen of death” appearing on computer screens.
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Delta Air Lines, which faced some of the worst cancellations, returned to “operational reliability” on Thursday but still faces an investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation, which said it was ensuring the company complied with the law and cared for passengers amid the disruptions.
Lisa Plaggemier, executive director of the National Cybersecurity Alliance, said in an interview that it shows that while the technology has advanced, it is still in its “infancy.”
“We’re dealing with an internet that was never designed to be secure,” she said. “We’re dealing with a lot of software and systems that were not designed to be secure or to be resilient to human error, or to prevent human error.”
Companies need to have business continuity plans, she said.
This could mean what some auto dealers did during the CDK incident: turning to pen and paper to keep the business running, just as they would in a power outage or natural disaster.
Depending on the technology you rely on, there may not be another system they can use.
For example, the update sent via CrowdStrike was deployed via Windows, meaning companies likely couldn’t simply switch to a Mac or Linux system to continue operating.
Javad Abed, a professor of information systems at Johns Hopkins University, told Global News that making backups is even more important, especially when it comes to cybersecurity.
“If you spend millions of dollars now, you are preventing a crisis in the future that could cause serious problems for different sectors, reputational damage, and also a huge financial loss,” he said. “Maybe it is more expensive to use other suppliers, alternative systems that go directly to them, but it is necessary.”
Alex Hamerstone, director of advisory solutions at TrustedSec, says the outcome in both situations, whether it’s a hacker attack, a human error outage or even the weather, is often the same.
“If lightning takes out a transformer or a part of the grid, you see what happens when that part of the grid goes down. It’s the same effect as if a hacker had done that,” he said.
“It shows that we have dependencies that can be exploited, whether through error or through human action.”
© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
Sean Previl
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