Global IT outage ‘may be biggest cyber incident ever’: Gerstell
- 'Defect' in software update caused global tech outage
- Microsoft and CrowdStrike said they were working on a fix
- Outage 'highlights vulnerabilities in system': ex-NSA counsel
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(NewsNation) — Glenn Gerstell, the National Security Agency’s former general counsel, said the global tech outage highlights how “we’ve let vulnerabilities creep into the system.”
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said it has identified and is fixing the “defect” in a software update it deployed to Microsoft Windows customers, one that crashed hundreds of thousands of computers overnight and crippled airlines, hospitals, banks and other businesses around the world.
“One of those big vulnerabilities is concentration,” Gerstell said Friday during an appearance on NewsNation’s “The Hill.” “This may well turn out to be, in terms of the actual impact on people’s lives, the biggest cyber and computer incident ever.”
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said customers remain “fully protected” and that they “understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption.”
“We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on,” Kurtz continued in a recent update. “As noted earlier, the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed. There was an issue with a Falcon content update for Windows Hosts.”
Many CrowdStrike customers were required to manually fix their systems, a time-consuming task that lengthened the outage.
NewsNation’s Bobby Oler and Devan Markham contributed to this report.
