CrowdStrike outage opens loopholes for criminals

Crowdstrike has warned organisations that its outage in July is being exploited by malicious actors to scam people and companies, for example, by creating fraudulent websites. 

Over the coming weeks and months, vital information should come to light about the scale and success of these adversarial activities and whether the outage itself was used by hackers to steal data from systems that failed open. 

Technological adoption has been driven by a desire to cut costs, automate processes and service delivery, and drive operational efficiency. Resilience of the operation that uses this technology is often an afterthought, or not given due attention.

This approach needs to change in order to fortify organisations against such outages:

• Legal resilience: Companies need to make sure they are compliant with extant laws and regulations. Non-compliance damages reputations and is hugely costly.
• Operational resilience: Companies that use technology need to stress-test their key disruption scenarios – eg, natural disaster, protests, attacks or IT failures – and have contingencies in place. Those contingencies could entail, say, a multi-cloud strategy, but it also entails making sure that organisations have alternative processes in place and the right talent to respond. Physical records of the most critically ill patients is an example of such an alternative for healthcare providers.
• Security resilience: Malicious actors, whether state-linked or financially-motivated criminals, use the same technology and tools that all of us use for work and communication everyday. Therefore, robust cybersecurity resilience of these common tools is essential.

Therefore, it is not sufficient to have the best technology and use it well, it is equally important to plan in non-crisis time, how organisations would deliver on their mission and conduct their business when that technology fails or becomes a problem.

Our Chief Product Officer Megha Kumar discussed this and related issues with Carole Walker on Times Radio Drive.