CrowdStrike

WASHINGTON: As businesses and corporates across the world struggle to recover from the two-day Microsoft outage due to a flawed update on Friday, CrowdStrike has warned the corporate world that hackers could exploit the situation to their advantage. On the other hand, technology giant Microsoft has deployed thousands of engineers and experts to restart its services on more than ten million devices.

Government cybersecurity agencies and the CEO of CrowdStrike have asked companies and the public to be wary of new phishing schemes that pretend to be Microsoft outages. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said hackers may impersonate companies or individuals by pretending to be Microsoft or CrowdStrike employees or other technology experts to recover computers and laptops from Microsoft outages. We know that bad actors, i.e. cybercriminals, may try to take advantage of this incident. We warn companies and the public to be vigilant. Meanwhile, Microsoft said in a blog that the problem caused by CrowdStrike's 'update' on July 18 affected 8.5 lakh to 1 crore devices worldwide. The company is deploying thousands of engineers and experts to work directly with customers to resume our services on these devices. However, less than one percent of all Windows-based computers and laptops experience this problem.

Microsoft said the company is collaborating with other cloud providers and stakeholders, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), to inform the industry about the impact. Also, conversations with CrowdStrike and customers can also be shared. The blog said that we are identifying the problem that this problem has caused in the industry and the daily routine of many individuals. Our focus is on providing technology guidance and support to customers to bring disrupted devices back online safely.

The software giant said the incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of a broader tech system with global cloud providers, software platforms, security vendors and other software vendors and customers.

– Microsoft outage has no effect on Russia-China

Microsoft's global outage caused work to come to a halt across the world.

On Friday, a blue screen error on millions of devices around the world halted services ranging from airlines to broadcasting. But there were only two countries in the world that were not affected by this outage. Business continued as usual in these two countries. These countries include China and Russia.

These are two countries that had realised in 2002 itself that if they remained dependent on American companies for technology in the future, it would harm them and they would become part of the crowd in a world where the companies and systems would be theirs, but they would remain dependent on America and Europe for technology.

In view of this threat, Russia and China developed their own technologies and the result is that today when the economies of many countries of the world were shaken due to the shutdown of Microsoft servers, China and Russia were not affected.