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Global IT Outage Spotlights Redundancy and Recovery

 
 

CrowdStrike Disruption

The global IT outage affecting flights, financial institutions, media organizations and more on Friday is a reminder of how interconnected our IT (and some OT) systems have become.

We’re still learning about the true cause of the disruption, but reports point to a faulty software update from CrowdStrike, the Austin, TX-based cybersecurity company.

What Happened?

Many systems automatically implement such updates, which allowed the error to spread overnight.

Government agencies and business use CrowdStrike’s service on Microsoft computers, and the faulty update caused a cascade of failures in the Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Social media users posted images from airports and electronic billboards of the so-called Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), which appears when there’s a major system error in a Windows-based computer.

Flights on American Airlines, Delta and United have experiences delays. Long lines formed at airports across the globe. Some payment systems were slow or not working correctly.

CrowdStrikes’s CEO gave TV interviews to say that some systems could be fixed automatically while others would require a manual workaround. That could take time as technicians would need to access computer terminals individually.

How to Protect Your Systems

Building a strong redundancy and recovery plan is critical to be prepared for unplanned outages.

It is important to ensure you’re backing up your industrial organization’s data. Some organizations assume data backups are happening when they aren’t, or they assume they’re happening more frequently, when that’s just not the case.

Just as important as data backups are backups for your organizations processes and programming, such as ladder logic and system configurations.

Recreating those configurations can be extremely challenging and time-consuming, compounding the impact of a data loss.

What GrayMatter Does

An OT cybersecurity assessment can help organizations determine the strength of their recovery and redundancy strategy. Sometimes it's as simple as documenting the communication and action plan in the event of a critical service disruption or cybersecurity incident.

GrayMatter conducts comprehensive OT cybersecurity assessments to pinpoint and remediate potential gaps in a company’s recovery plan.

Some industrial organizations need more resources to implement their cybersecurity strategy. GrayMatterMDR – managed detection and response – is a managed services solution that helps companies fill their resources gap by providing assessment, remediation and continuous monitoring services.

Outages like the one many are experiencing today are a reminder that end-users and software companies can do more to build strong, more resilient systems.

 

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