File Photo: Financial Technology (Fintech): Its Uses and Impact on Our Lives
When computers and electronic systems around the world went down Friday, clogging airports, halting Social Security offices and curtailing jail operations, many people had one question: How on earth could this happen in 2024?
A software update from a single cybersecurity company, US-based CrowdStrike, was the fundamental cause of the upheaval, illustrating the fragility of the global economy and its dependence on computer systems, to which very few people give a passing thought.
“Most people believe that when the end of the world comes, it will be AI taking over some kind of nuclear power plant and shutting down electricity,” Costin Raiu, a longstanding cybersecurity expert, quipped to CNN. “While in reality, it’s more likely to be some kind of little bit of code in a botched update, causing a cascade reaction in interdependent cloud systems.”
Software updates are a key function in society to keep computers protected from hackers. But the update procedure itself is vital to get properly done and to safeguard from tampering. An inherent — and some say mistaken — faith in that process was ruptured on Friday.
Over the past decade, multibillion-dollar CrowdStrike has developed globally. Many more businesses and countries are now protected from cyberthreats because of this, but the dominance of a handful of corporations in the anti-virus and threat-detection sector brings its own hazards, according to experts.
‘Winning’ in the marketplace can aggregate risk, and we all—consumers and companies—pay the costs,” Walther-Puri added.
The large range of vital infrastructure providers affected by the outage may also prompt US politicians and corporate executives to consider new policy options to prevent repeat disasters.
When asked about the Friday IT outage, senior White House tech and cybersecurity officer Anne Neuberger cited “risks of consolidation” in the IT supply chain.
“We need to really think about our digital resilience, not just in the systems we run but in the globally connected security systems, the risks of consolidation, how we deal with that consolidation and how we ensure that if an incident does occur, it can be contained and we can recover quickly,” Neuberger said at the Aspen Security Forum about the IT outage.
The hectic Friday scenario did not involve a malevolent actor, but government officials worldwide will likely be speculating.
A modified SolarWinds software upgrade caused the 2020 US government attack, which US officials blamed on Russia. This hack was less disruptive, but a 2017 Russian hack caused billions of dollars in global economic harm due to widespread malware.
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