No need to unplug internet, but keep some cash on you
A global internet outage which impacted eftpos use and grounded flights on the weekend shows we were often relying too heavily on the internet, a Taranaki IT boss says.
On Friday night, an update by cybersecurity giant Crowdstrike inadvertently led to the shut-down of millions of computer systems worldwide.
People were left unable to buy groceries as some digital payment methods failed, flights were delayed, hospital records frozen and personal computers crashed.
To Ourcloud general manager Steve Collett, it demonstrated both an over reliance on computer systems and the value of old-school back-ups in case of emergencies. “Hey, information technology is an enabler and the systems are great, but if all the systems are off for a while, what do you do,” he said.
“I think it was [New Plymouth mayor] Neil Holdom who said, ‘I always have half a tank of gas and $200 stashed away’, and that’s pretty good advice.”
Collett said businesses anxious about whether they risked a similar or worse failures in future, could sleep more easily if they kept digital backups up to date.
That’s so there’s something to bring online lest other attempts to reconnect fail, he said. “Make sure your backups are up to date, every two to three days. To fix things this time around was straightforward but next time it might not be. We might have to restore from a backup.”
He said his Ourcloud was busy following the Crowdstrike event, bringing businesses back online.
Because its servers were cloud based with two big data centres, one in New Plymouth, the other in Hamilton, the team was able to respond to clients remotely.
Collett said while many people were blaming Microsoft, the issue was caused by Crowdstrike, which provided antivirus services for millions of data servers and computers worldwide.
“Crowdstrike is one of the leaders in this space, a premium supplier. It’s been renowned for being one of the leaders for a long time. The product, the way it integrates with Microsoft Windows, means there’s a risk it may happen again. But it has to integrate heavily with Windows to be able to stop attacks. ”
As it turned out, Holdom had stuck to his own advice and was carrying cash on Friday when he popped into Woolworths at the Valley for some bread rolls and found three self-service checkouts down.
“They had sideways smiley faces, they glitched, they had the blue screen of death,” he said yesterday.
He later posted his advice about petrol and cash onto his Linkedin page.
“The world is becoming increasingly more complicated and amazing with the wide array of technology advancing at incredible pace,” he wrote.
“As an early adopter I love playing with technology and seeing what it’s capable of but also ensure that I’m ready to get back to basics in the event of failure.”
Former intelligence and defence policy analyst Paul Buchanan hoped the weekend’s events were a wakeup call for the government’s National Cyber Security Centre, the Sunday Star Times reported. “I would hope that they’d get out in front of this and say, OK, let’s come up with a strategy or a concerted plan in the event of a global network blackout that affects our airlines and our fish and chip shops.”
Stuff was among Crowdstrike customers impacted by the faulty Microsoft malware update, but all systems were back up and running the next day.