Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Danu Abeysuirya: IT expert says CrowdStrike could face a flurry of lawsuits after global outage

Transcript

Danu Abeysuirya: IT expert says CrowdStrike could face a flurry of lawsuits after global outage · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Parts of the world came to a stop on Friday
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: night when computer systems crashed, leaving people looking an error
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: message known as the Blue Screen of Death. Flights were grounded,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: payment systems were down, street lights in Levin were turned off.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Had just Livin or or the other places too? Presumably
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: it was all caused by an update to Microsoft devices
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: issued by the tech company crowd Strike, whose shares have
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: since plummeted. It expert and Rush Digital founder done to Abassia,
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: is with me now done a good morning? How they
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: say that this affected only one percent of Microsoft's computers
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: and yet it seems to have have had a huge
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: impact on, you know, lots of different parts of the world.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: Why is that, Yeah, it's it's because a lot of
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: server software, a lot of service systems actually support many
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: many users. So the Microsoft Azure cloud was affected by this,
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: which is why so many of online services went out.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: And if you think about banking servers, you know they
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: might only have a couple of servers, but it serves
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: their entire customer bass right, So if you have if
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: you take out a few of these machines, they cause
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: these kinds of outages.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: So that that statistic that they put out saying it's
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: I don't worry, it's only one percent. That actually it's
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: not the full picture.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: Really. Yeah, there's a bit of spin on that, right,
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: Like they're not really talking about how many people had
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: affected that that would be one percent, right, they said,
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: they're just talking about purely computer systems, which I don't
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: think is a really fair metric.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Using could it happen again? And could cyber criminals do
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: exactly what they have done? I mean, if I was
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: a cyber criminal, I'd be looking at what happened on
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Friday and I'd be thinking, right, how can I do that?
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, No, it's a it's a pretty interesting point. I think.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: One thing that is, I guess leaked as you know,
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: the intelligence with what they call intelligence, but basically cyber
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: criminals knowing what kind of software you're running. It's kind
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: of like knowing what kind of lock you've got on
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: your door, and if there's a vulnerability about that lock,
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: you know they're going to be using that. There have
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: been reports of fishing and sort of cybersecurity scams already
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: pretending to be you know, support staff from CrowdStrike and
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: Microsoft and other vendors that were involved in the outage,
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: So yeah, absolutely spot on. You know, cybercriminals doing what
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: side of cernels do best, I guess. Yeah.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: And interestingly, China dodged a bullet on all of this
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: because they don't use CrowdStrike.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I think that you'd probably refer to that
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: as some kind of unintended side effect of not trusting
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: American technology companies. But it does demonstrate, you know, there
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: there's definitely been a failure from CrowdStrike to properly test
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: their software before sending it out. That's evident because if
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: it affected eight point five million machines, it's really hard
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: to believe that, you know, the test team couldn't reproduce
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: it in their lab before releasing it. So I think
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: crowdstrikes in for a world are hurt in terms of
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: lawsuits and liabilities.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, especially when you've got especially when you've got emergency
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: services lines down as a result of it as well. Danu,
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: thank you very much for your time this morning. Always
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: appreciate your insight. That's done to Abassiria. He's the IT
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: expert and Rush Digital founder.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: It's for more from News Talks ed B listen live
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: on air or online and keep our shows with you
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: wherever you go with our podcasts on iHeartRadio,