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Massive world outage shows technology vulnerability

19/07/2024

The vulnerability of global tech was brought sharply into focus by a major outage affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third-party software platform that suffered a massive drop in stock valuation as a result of the disruption.


Initial fears of an orchestrated cyberattack were quickly dismissed by CrowdStrike, the company involved. As a result of this high profile problem, CrowdStrike lost $16 billion in its overnight valuation as the extent of the outage became evident.


According to an alert sent by CrowdStrike to its clients the company’s “Falcon Sensor” software caused Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death”.


George Kurtz, the CEO of CrowdStrike said: " This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”


The company states on its website that “CrowdStrike secures the most critical areas of risk – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity, and data – to keep customers ahead of today’s adversaries and stop breaches.”


It is believed to be the biggest IT issue since the WannaCry cyber-attack in May 2017. In that incident a cyber-attack affected an old version of Windows and spread automatically and uncontrollably to any computer that had that old and unprotected Windows software.


As a result of this incident, insurance firms may see an increase in claims  as witnessed in August 2023 when UK passengers were hit with flight delays and cancellations due to a technical failure that meant controllers were not able to automatically process flight plans. Sid Mouncey, Blink Parametric chief executive, said at the time that he saw a “surge in claims activity”.


This latest software problem affected airlines across the world, halting flights, some broadcasters went off-air with banking and healthcare hit while banks and other financial institutions from Australia to India and South Africa warned clients about disruptions to their services.


W Denis Europe can arrange both D&O and E&O insurance for businesses, large and small, throughout Europe. For more information, or a quotation, please contact W Denis Europe:


Eastern Europe

Vida.Jarasiunaite@wdenis.eu


Southern Europe

Christos.Hadjisotiris@wdenis.com


Western Europe &/or elsewhere worldwide

Mark.Dutton@wdenis.com

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