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Paul Spain: tech commentator explains the latest Microsoft outage · Best of Business

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  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from news Talk ZEDB. Follow
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• 0:16
  Speaker 2: First, I want to tell you about my day, and
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  Speaker 2: then I'll get Paul Spain on to explain about my day.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: But my day, it's lovely at the moment doing I
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: Heather's job because normally I do a breakfast show on
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: a rock radio station called Gold. You should try it sometime.
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  Speaker 2: It's very good. And so I'm normally up early. I'm not,
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  Speaker 2: you know, I don't get to sleep. And at the
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  Speaker 2: moment this week, I am not doing that show. I'm
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  Speaker 2: doing this show that means I sleep. I do some
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  Speaker 2: breakfasts and that's lovely. Read the newspaper, start thinking about
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: what I'm going to say, go to the gym. So
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  Speaker 2: I went to the gym at eight o'clock today and
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  Speaker 2: I did a good hour and a half workout. And
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  Speaker 2: as I'm coming home, hot and sweaty and getting ready
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  Speaker 2: to get into it, have a shower and start writing stuff,
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  Speaker 2: I get an alert that's saying Microsoft Outlook is down.
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  Speaker 2: It's a global cyber attack. It's involving Microsoft ze me
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  Speaker 2: emails down. Therefore, we are working with Microsoft on the problem.
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  Speaker 2: This caused me great consternation because how I write my
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  Speaker 2: stuff is on Microsoft Word through Outlook and then share
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  Speaker 2: it with work on Google. So if I'm writing at
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  Speaker 2: home and I can't email myself and all that sort
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  Speaker 2: of thing, and I can't use the Google Home to
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  Speaker 2: actually sort of mirror the stuff back, how am I
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  Speaker 2: get these bond mots to myself? So I actually told
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  Speaker 2: my producer, who phoned up and we're talking about I said,
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  Speaker 2: I'm going to stick it on my memory stick. I mean,
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  Speaker 2: you've got a memory stick and I've got a memory stick.
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  Speaker 2: You're not supposed to bring memory sticks in because you
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  Speaker 2: plug them into computers, they bring in viruses or viray whatever. Anyway,
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  Speaker 2: I got a memory stick and I was thinking about that,
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  Speaker 2: and then we figured out how to get service back.
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  Speaker 2: So joining me now is Paul Spain, tech commentator and
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  Speaker 2: Guerrilla Tech CEO.
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  Speaker 3: Hello, Paul, Hello, how are we doing? Andrew It?
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  Speaker 2: Well, we're good now that we're back online. I'm getting
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  Speaker 2: a bit tired of the Microsoft cyber attacks. What's happening here?
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  Speaker 3: Well, you know what we know around today as it
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  Speaker 3: was largely New Zealand that was impacted. So this one
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  Speaker 3: wasn't you know, so much of a global issue. It
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  Speaker 3: was very very focused on New Zealand. And it appears
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  Speaker 3: as though what we're dealing with is something called a
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  Speaker 3: distributed denial of service attack, which you can, if you
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  Speaker 3: want to sort of think of it simply. It's a
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  Speaker 3: little bit like when we have a protest that floods
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  Speaker 3: the motorway with tractors or trucks or some other such thing,
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  Speaker 3: and you've got an adversary who is basically trying to
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  Speaker 3: trying to cause problems for Microsoft and Microsoft customers by
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  Speaker 3: flooding sort of certain areas of the internet with with
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  Speaker 3: with too much data or traffic as we call it,
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  Speaker 3: and that brings things to sometimes to a standstill, sometimes
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  Speaker 3: just sort of slows slows things down. And that's really
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  Speaker 3: what's what's happened today. Now a lot of people haven't
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  Speaker 3: felt the pain, but other people have.
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  Speaker 2: Like me, who wants to do this sort of thing
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  Speaker 2: to us? I mean, we've got weird in New zeal
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  Speaker 2: We've got no enemies in the world.
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  Speaker 3: Well, there are always folks out to, you know, have
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  Speaker 3: an impact. Sometimes that's they want to cause a financial
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  Speaker 3: impact and then they can put pressure on an organization
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  Speaker 3: such as Microsoft and say, look, we're going to you know,
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  Speaker 3: stop your operation in New Zealand unless you front up
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  Speaker 3: and drop you know, x amount of you know, funds
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  Speaker 3: in our direction, usually in cryptocurrency. So basically it's it's
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  Speaker 3: a you know, it's used from that perspective of a
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  Speaker 3: ransom or a bribery type situation. Or it can be
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  Speaker 3: you know, a country, so it can be sort of
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  Speaker 3: you know, politically driven. It can be a country, uh,
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  Speaker 3: you know, a particular cause that someone's trying to push
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  Speaker 3: and to make a little bit of a point. So
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  Speaker 3: you know, these are the situations we see.
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  Speaker 2: But today's outage, we don't know who did it.
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  Speaker 3: No, I haven't. I haven't seen anything to you know,
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  Speaker 3: to indicate that at this point. And there there are
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  Speaker 3: often reasons why an organization you know, might know, but
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  Speaker 3: might not just you know, disclose that publicly at a
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  Speaker 3: given point in time. But you know, maybe we'll share
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  Speaker 3: you know, further information down the track.
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  Speaker 2: Was there any data taken.
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  Speaker 3: This type of attack generally the attacker has no access
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  Speaker 3: to you know, to any anybody's data. It's more you
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  Speaker 3: know that that as I say, they're kind of it's
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  Speaker 3: like flooding a motorway. So it's not like they're they're
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  Speaker 3: inside your systems, inside your building and so on. It's
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  Speaker 3: more they're trying to block you get access, you gaining
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  Speaker 3: access rather than than them having having any level of
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  Speaker 3: access themselves.
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  Speaker 2: Did Microsoft, were they helpful or or were they hendry?
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  Speaker 3: Look, you know, I think we we beat organizations like
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  Speaker 3: Microsoft to be really well geared up to deal with
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  Speaker 3: this this type of attack. Uh. And you know, in
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  Speaker 3: in this case, yeah, maybe they didn't kind of get
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  Speaker 3: it quite right in terms of their their ability to
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  Speaker 3: to you know, to block this and deal with it correctly. Yeah,
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  Speaker 3: they I mean, yeah, there's certainly certainly some culpability. You know,
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  Speaker 3: I think too, you know, to a degree. But you know,
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  Speaker 3: depending on the scale and the and the size of
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  Speaker 3: you know, of this type of attack, you know that
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  Speaker 3: there there probably is a point where a company can
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  Speaker 3: can completely block it. And and there's a point where, yeah,
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  Speaker 3: those sort of attackers can can have a level of
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  Speaker 3: impact that We've seen other New Zealand organizations hit with
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  Speaker 3: this type of attack n z X in the past. Uh.
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  Speaker 3: And they, you know, maybe didn't have some things quite
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  Speaker 3: right and you know, made some changes, and and you
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  Speaker 3: know they eventually, you know, got through that and came
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  Speaker 3: back to full operation.
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  Speaker 2: So Paul, one last question. Okay, and after CrowdStrike and
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  Speaker 2: after realizing how many people use outlook and teams, are we,
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  Speaker 2: in fact, in the business world generally relying on two
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  Speaker 2: small a number of companies to provide our services techwise,
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  Speaker 2: So it's easy to take out a whole country. It's
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  Speaker 2: easy to almost take out a whole.
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  Speaker 3: World in simple terms. You know, I would say, yes,
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  Speaker 3: I wish there was more competition, you know, to these
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  Speaker 3: biggest global providers. And so if you look at a
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  Speaker 3: Microsoft three sixty five, which is what the very large
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  Speaker 3: majority of organizations in New Zealand use for you know,
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  Speaker 3: for their core technology email and document editing and storage
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  Speaker 3: and spreadsheets and so on, they're very very dominant. Google
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  Speaker 3: have a very small slice of that that that market here.
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  Speaker 3: It would be great if you know, if Google and
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  Speaker 3: others we're more competitive and that it was split a
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  Speaker 3: little bit more evenly. But at the moment, you know,
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  Speaker 3: Microsoft's offerings, you know, are generally, you know, probably head
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  Speaker 3: and shoulders above the competition, and and so therefore they
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  Speaker 3: hold the you know, the line's share of the market.
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  Speaker 3: It would be much easier if that wasn't the case,
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  Speaker 3: but it's where we're at right now.
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  Speaker 2: Absolutely, Paul. Thank you so much. Paul from Gorilla Gorilla
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  Speaker 2: Tech CEO, tech commentator.
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