Crowdstrike tech outage won't be an easy fix, says expert
(FOX 9) - The ripple effects of the Crowdstrike tech outage that has disrupted some airlines through the weekend are still being felt.
On Monday, Delta canceled dozens more flights at MSP Airport and hundreds across the country.
Cybersecurity expert Mark Lanterman, who is an expert in computer forensic services, explained why the fix for the outage won't be easy for companies.
Why is it taking so long to fix?
Lanterman: The reason why organizations are still struggling to recover from this, is because it's a manual fix. This is not a repair that can be done remotely, en masse — it cannot be automated. It requires I.T. personnel to access computers physically. They need to boot the computer from a thumb drive. And then there's a certain file that needs to be deleted. So it's not an easy fix.
It takes 10 to 15 minutes to correct this issue, but a person has to do it and multiply 15 minutes across X number of computers. And a large organization like Delta, you could be talking days or weeks.
What lesson is there to learn?
Lanterman: I think the lesson here is whenever we gain a benefit from technology, we pay a price. And that price could be insecurity, it could be outages when something goes wrong. I think it's important for us, though, to make sure that we're perhaps testing software updates before applying them blindly.
How to prevent another disaster?
Lanterman: The alternative may be to find a different vendor, perhaps a vendor who has quality control in place. I heard CrowdStrike's CEO state that this was not a cyberattack. I'd argue that any event that takes down so many organizations, including members of our nation's critical infrastructure, I'd say that is a cyberattack. It's an attack of incompetence. And unfortunately, there is no patch to fix that.
For consumers
The best advice I have for consumers is back up your data and perhaps wait a couple of days before applying a software update to hear whether or not there are there are problems with it.