A former FBI supervisory special agent has said the national security implications of today’s global cyber blackout are “bigger than most people realize.”
Rob D’Amico said nation-state cyber actors — known as adversaries engaged in targeted malicious cyber activity, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — are likely watching what happened during the technology outage.
“They may not be involved in what happened, but they are watching what happened, what the reactions were, the response times, how it was remediated, so that if they consider an offensive cyber operation against the United States, they can map out what was done,” D’Amico told Erin Burnett of CNN on nation-state cyber actors.
He added that another national security concern could be cyber actors trying to take advantage of the flaw to carry out phishing attacks.
CrowdStrike, the company behind the technology outage, said in a statement on Friday (19) that “this was not a cyber attack” and that the company’s team “is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of the company’s customers”.
D’Amico said he is skeptical of the company’s claim that the incident was not a security issue.
Global cyber blackout affects airports, TVs, banks and hospitals
Major US airlines canceled hundreds of flights on Friday (19), citing communications problems, while other carriers, media companies, banks and telecommunications companies around the world also reported that system failures had disrupted their operations.
American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines and Allegiant Air suspended flights less than an hour after Microsoft said it had resolved a cloud services outage that affected several low-cost carriers.
In Australia, media, banking and telecommunications companies suffered disruptions. Several countries in Asia were also affected, as well as in Europe.
In Germany, one of Europe’s largest healthcare facilities, the German University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH), canceled all elective procedures on Friday, according to a statement on its website.
See images of the impacts of the technological failure.
Source: CNN Brasil
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