Tom Gerken
BBC News
Planes Grounded As Worldwide IT Outage Hits Airlines Banks and Healthcare – We don’t yet know what is causing the IT outage affecting companies around the world.
But earlier today American Airlines blamed a “technical issue with Crowdstrike” – and now the Swiss cyber security office is pointing the finger, too
Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company founded in 2011 with the aim of safeguarding the world’s biggest companies and hardware from cyber threats and vulnerabilities.
It specialises in endpoint security protection and tries to prevent malicious software or files from hitting corporate networks from devices that connect to them, such as phones and laptops.
It also aims to protect the data of companies which have shifted from guarding it under their own roof, or on their own servers, to so-called cloud providers.
The Texas-based firm was co-founded by entrepreneurs George Kurtz, who remains chief executive, and Dmitri Alperovitch. It listed its shares publicly on the tech heavy Nasdaq stock exchange in 2019.
Since it first launched, the company has seemingly played a key role in helping firms investigate cyber-attacks.
In 2016 Crowdstrike was called in by the US Democratic National Committee, the strategy arm of the Democrat Party, to investigate a breach into its computer network.
Swiss cyber security office blames Crowdstrike
A faulty update or misconfiguration by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike is behind the worldwide IT outage, the Swiss Federal Office for Cyber Security tells Reuters news agency.
More than 1,000 flights cancelled globally so far
More than 1,000 planes grounded around the world today so far, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
This figure – currently 1,078 – will only get bigger as the knock-on impacts grow.
The firm also says today was set to be the busiest day for UK flight departures so far this year, with more than 3,200 departures scheduled – the highest number of daily departures since October 2019.
The biggest IT problem since at least 2017
says Joe Tidy
Cyber correspondent
For my money, we’ve not seen as bad an IT issue since the WannaCry cyber-attack in May 2017.
That was a malicious cyber-attack that affected an old version of Windows and spread automatically and uncontrollably to any computer that had that old and unprotected Windows software.
It affected an estimated 300,000 computers in 150 different countries. Famously the NHS was badly hit with huge disruption for days.
In that case, it was an attack that got out of hand. Today’s outage was caused by a defect found in a Crowdstrike cyber-security software update.
source : BBC.com
