But that’s not because of its decade spent securing and protecting a bulk of the world’s computers – rather because ofCheckouts at some Coles stores remained offline on Saturday morning after the CrowdStrike outage.Many have understandably jumped to the conclusion that some kind of incompetence at CrowdStrike is responsible, or that someone at the company acted outside the normal checks and balances.
New threats to the computers we rely on emerge every hour daily, and bad actors are far more motivated to take advantage of them than end users are to protect themselves. That’s why your work computer likely has some kind of real-time protection running in the background, and your IT people likely set it, so your computer has to be rebooted occasionally to implement important updates.
CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz has been in damage control since the issue became apparent, but in time, governments and companies globally will and should expect a full explanation of what happened and how it can be avoided in the future.Louise Kennerley Tony Anscombe, chief security evangelist at global security company ESET, said CrowdStrike shouldn’t necessarily be criticised for the problem. But the incident does highlight some issues in need of addressing.“We should not lose sight of who is to blame when an incident such as this happens. If cybercriminals and nation state attackers did not create cyberthreats, then we would not need protection in real-time,” he said.