Technology Magazine August 2024 | Page 82

IT OUTAGE

“ The global outage demonstrates how reliant many organisations have become on digitised services . The incident had extensive cyber impacts . It inadvertently revealed which companies were using Windows 10 / 11 and CrowdStrike ’ s Falcon Sensor . Trust issues regarding security patching have arisen and recovery keys became inaccessible , rendering backups unusable .

“ Threat actors have exploited the situation , launching phishing campaigns and social engineering attacks . Managing cybersecurity risk remains a significant challenge , with threat actors also looking to target our national infrastructure .

“ However , a robust approach to cybersecurity risk management and security architecture can significantly reduce the impact of these types of incidents . Organisations should undertake a high-level cyber risk assessment to understand which services are critical and work out the risks that could significantly impact these or their ability to deliver to customers . Considering the cybersecurity risks associated with widely used components , such as CloudStrike , can help firms develop suitable mitigations . “ For software and security updates , a staged deployment – with the ability to roll back updates – can be a good mitigation measure . Staging the deployment of updates allows any issues not found during verification to be identified in the field and the ability to roll back reduces the risk of services being unavailable .”

82 August 2024