Panoramic view of Singapore’s Changi Airport on July 19, 2024, as passengers gathered and waited due to a global communications outage caused by CrowdStrike (which provides cybersecurity services to the American technology company Microsoft).
Zakaria Zanar | Anadolu | Getty Images
As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a cybersecurity firm’s faulty software update mass strikemalicious actors seek to exploit the situation for personal gain.
Government cybersecurity agencies around the world and even CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are issuing warnings to businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors impersonating CrowdStrike employees or other technical experts. Assistance from personnel recovering from outages.
“We know adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit incidents like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and make sure to engage with an official CrowdStrike representative.”
The UK Cyber Security Center said it had noticed an increase in phishing attempts surrounding this incident.
Microsoft On Friday, 8.5 million devices running the Windows operating system were affected by a faulty cybersecurity update, causing outages worldwide. That’s less than 1% of all Windows-based computers, David Weston, Microsoft’s director of cybersecurity, said in a blog post on Saturday.
He also said that riots of this magnitude were rare but “demonstrated The interconnectedness of our broad ecosystem”.
What happened to air travel?
Airlines around the world had canceled more than 1,500 flights as of late morning on the U.S. East Coast, far fewer than the more than 5,100 canceled on Friday, according to tracking service FlightAware.
Two-thirds of Saturday’s canceled flights were in the United States, where airlines scrambled to get planes and crews back in place after massive disruptions the day before. American Airlines canceled about 3.5% of scheduled flights on Saturday, according to travel data provider Cirium. Only Australia has been hit harder.
Among major air travel markets, approximately 1% of flights were canceled in the UK, France and Brazil, and approximately 2% were canceled in Canada, Italy and India.
Robert Mann, a former airline executive who is now a New York-area consultant, said it was unclear exactly why American Airlines was experiencing such a disproportionate number of flight cancellations, but possible reasons included greater outsourcing of technology and greater exposure to Microsoft operating system.
What is the state of the health care system?
Health care systems affected by the outages face clinic closures, cancellations of surgeries and appointments, and restrictions on access to patient records.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, said it was “making steady progress” in bringing its servers back online and thanked patients for their flexibility during the crisis.
“Our teams will be working aggressively throughout the weekend to continue to address remaining issues and be ready for the start of the work week,” the hospital wrote in a statement. statement.
In Austria, a leading doctors’ group said the outage had exposed the fragility of systems that rely on digital systems. Harald Mayer, vice-president of the Austrian Doctors Association, said the outage demonstrated the need for hospitals to have analog backups to protect patient care.
The organization also called on governments to implement high standards for patient data protection and security, and for healthcare providers to train staff and establish crisis management systems.
“Happily, where problems have occurred, they have been small and short-lived, and many areas of care have been unaffected,” Mayer said.
The University Hospital of Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany canceled all elective surgeries on Friday and said on Saturday that the system was gradually recovering and elective surgeries could resume on Monday.
