Global IT outages caused by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike highlight the vulnerability in using a single supplier on a large scale and will be 'nauseating to fix', warned Tom Kidwell, a former British Army and UK Government intelligence specialist, IT expert and co-founder of Ecliptic Dynamics.
“The outage impacting Windows devices and servers at airports, hospitals and stores around the world appears to have been caused by a driver update by CrowdStrike, bricking older windows devices and servers, which will be worst hit," he stated. "Unfortunately for CrowdStrike, if that is the case it could be nauseating to fix.
"Due to the nature of the update, an individual from every organisation will need to boot into safemode, remove the issue file/driver, and then either roll back or update to a new version, something CrowdStrike will need to release very quickly.
“Incidents like this highlight the vulnerability in using a single supplier on such a vast scale, and why it’s critical that organisations have a backup plan. Best practice for vendors is to pressure test any updates before rollout, however this can be difficult when you serve 60-90% of the world.”