Danu Abeysuirya: IT expert says CrowdStrike could face a flurry of lawsuits after global outage

An IT expert believes there'll be a flurry of lawsuits on the back of Friday's global IT outage. 

Microsoft estimated 8.5 million computers were disabled with a blue screen of death, and experts predict it'll be weeks before all systems fully recover.  

It is believed the outage was triggered by an update from global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. 

IT expert Danu Abeysuirya told Ryan Bridge CrowdStrike failed in its responsibilities. 

He says the company's in for a world of hurt via lawsuits. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Parts of the world came to a stop on Friday
night when computer systems crashed, leaving people looking an error
message known as the Blue Screen of Death. Flights were grounded,
payment systems were down, street lights in Levin were turned off.
Had just Livin or or the other places too? Presumably
it was all caused by an update to Microsoft devices

(00:21):
issued by the tech company crowd Strike, whose shares have
since plummeted. It expert and Rush Digital founder done to Abassia,
is with me now done a good morning? How they
say that this affected only one percent of Microsoft's computers
and yet it seems to have have had a huge
impact on, you know, lots of different parts of the world.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Why is that, Yeah, it's it's because a lot of
server software, a lot of service systems actually support many
many users. So the Microsoft Azure cloud was affected by this,
which is why so many of online services went out.
And if you think about banking servers, you know they

(01:04):
might only have a couple of servers, but it serves
their entire customer bass right, So if you have if
you take out a few of these machines, they cause
these kinds of outages.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
So that that statistic that they put out saying it's
I don't worry, it's only one percent. That actually it's
not the full picture.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Really. Yeah, there's a bit of spin on that, right,
Like they're not really talking about how many people had
affected that that would be one percent, right, they said,
they're just talking about purely computer systems, which I don't
think is a really fair metric.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Using could it happen again? And could cyber criminals do
exactly what they have done? I mean, if I was
a cyber criminal, I'd be looking at what happened on
Friday and I'd be thinking, right, how can I do that?

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah, No, it's a it's a pretty interesting point. I think.
One thing that is, I guess leaked as you know,
the intelligence with what they call intelligence, but basically cyber
criminals knowing what kind of software you're running. It's kind
of like knowing what kind of lock you've got on
your door, and if there's a vulnerability about that lock,
you know they're going to be using that. There have
been reports of fishing and sort of cybersecurity scams already

(02:10):
pretending to be you know, support staff from CrowdStrike and
Microsoft and other vendors that were involved in the outage,
So yeah, absolutely spot on. You know, cybercriminals doing what
side of cernels do best, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
And interestingly, China dodged a bullet on all of this
because they don't use CrowdStrike.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah. Yeah, I think that you'd probably refer to that
as some kind of unintended side effect of not trusting
American technology companies. But it does demonstrate, you know, there
there's definitely been a failure from CrowdStrike to properly test
their software before sending it out. That's evident because if
it affected eight point five million machines, it's really hard

(02:50):
to believe that, you know, the test team couldn't reproduce
it in their lab before releasing it. So I think
crowdstrikes in for a world are hurt in terms of
lawsuits and liabilities.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Absolutely, especially when you've got especially when you've got emergency
services lines down as a result of it as well. Danu,
thank you very much for your time this morning. Always
appreciate your insight. That's done to Abassiria. He's the IT
expert and Rush Digital founder.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
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