When Tech Giants Stumble like CrowdStrike and Microsoft, the World Feels the Tremor.

Story by Shane Snider

Key Points:

• Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s update early Friday wreaked havoc on Microsoft Windows hosts globally, canceling flights, impacting hospitals, banks, news organizations, railways, and other critical services as companies scramble to find a fix.
• CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on his LinkedIn account said the outage was not the result of a cyberattack and blamed a defective update to its Falcon antivirus software.
• In a response on LinkedIn, Jose Calderon (Jose C.), IT director for the City of El Segundo, Calif., wrote, “A fail this historic deserves to have the fix be posted on your homepage and ALL your socials ASAP. Teams all around the world are running fire drills right now to get a handle on things and you want us to open a ticket?!!!”
• The travel industry was one of the biggest victims of the day, with Airports in the US, Australia, Japan, India, Europe, and more causing outages and delays. Hospitals were also badly hit. Israel said 15 hospitals had to switch to manual processes and ambulances were told to take cases to other hospitals, according to BBC.
• “The damage to business processes at the global level is dramatic … There are two main issues on the agenda: The first is how customers get back online and regain continuity of business processes. It turns out that because the endpoints have crashed -- the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ -- they cannot be updated remotely and this problem must be solved manually, endpoint by endpoint. This is expected to be a process that will take days,” Omer Grossman , CIO at Israeli firm CyberArk , tells InformationWeek in an email.
• "Perhaps the biggest lesson is to adopt a program of phased deployments of updates, which is best practice in many industries and organizations in any case. Always start with a test group. Make sure to categorize what are critical systems and what aren't," Grossman says.
• This story is developing, and InformationWeek will update.

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Are Employees Inadvertently Jeopardizing Cybersecurity Efforts?

Story by Lisa Morgan, CeM, J.D.

Key Points:

• One notable threat is the fact that consumer-grade products and services weren’t designed for enterprise-grade security and compliance, which can cause data leakage, unauthorized access and compliance breaches.
• “To address this threat, employees need training on IT policies, emphasizing the risks of shadow IT and the importance of consulting IT before adopting new tools. Enterprises can deploy cloud access security brokers (CASBs) to monitor and control unauthorized cloud services, ensuring adherence to security policies,” says Omer?? Cohen, CISO at customer authentication and identity management platform Descope, in an email interview.
• The threat landscape is evolving, and attack surfaces are expanding. Still, one of organizations’ weakest links is often well-meaning employees making inadvertent mistakes.?Employees may also be lax about software updates, which can translate to unpatched vulnerabilities.
• “Even with robust protections in place, a cybersecurity incident can make the organization appear to have a poor cybersecurity program. This harms value to investors and reputation to customers,” says Jordan Rae Kelly, a senior managing director and head of cybersecurity for the Americas at business consulting and global advisory firm FTI Consulting in an email interview.
• In the slideshow above, we reveal more ways employees undermine cybersecurity and what to do about them.

MSpy is the Latest Company to be Bitten by the Breach Bug

Story by Carrie Pallardy

Key Points:

• Mobile spyware company mSpy is the latest?to make headlines for a breach that impacts millions of people. In May 2024, an attacker stole customer service records dating back to 2014 from the phone surveillance company, TechCrunch reports.
• While any breach of personal information comes with serious privacy concerns, mSpy’s services adds another layer of complexity to the privacy dynamics.?The privacy of not only mSpy’s customers but also the people they are monitoring, with consent or without, are at risk in a breach like this.??
• The fallout of the breach could result in both brand damage -- if you are using a service like this you likely don’t want that information leaked -- and litigation.?The mSpy breach comes on the heels of the latest massive AT&T breach, which affected nearly all of the telecommunications company’s customers.
• Enterprise leaders need to be able to answer questions like: What data do we have? Where is it being shared? Who has access? Who has access and who doesn’t need it? What data can be deleted???

What's Next for SolarWinds ?

Story by Shane Snider

Key Points:

• During “Sunburst,” a cyberattack spanning nearly two years targeted SolarWinds’ flagship software platform, Orion. The attack struck several US government networks, including the departments of Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, State, and Treasury. The 2019 attacks were revealed in December 2020.
• In his 107-page decision, Manhattan US District Judge Paul Engelmayer dismissed all claims against SolarWinds and its CISO Timothy Brown over his statements about the attack -- saying the charges were based on “hindsight and speculation.”
• Russia has denied responsibility for the attack. But the US government said Russia was likely behind the hacking group known as Nobelium. The SEC filed its case back in October. The SEC’s 68-page complaint included specific alleged misstatements by Brown. The SEC alleged SolarWinds failed to disclose that the vulnerability was shared by other customers as well, including two unnamed cybersecurity firms and one unnamed federal agency.
• Joe Sullivan, security consultant and former Uber CSO who was indicted after a 2016 breach and sentenced to three years of probation, said the ruling is a good sign for CISOs and other IT leaders who are feeling legal heat after cyberattacks.

How Will AI Impact the Future of Law Enforcement?

Story by John Edwards

Key Points:

• AI has a tremendous and very exciting potential to streamline various aspects of law enforcement, making processes more efficient and effective, says David Rome , an attorney with Los Angeles criminal defense law firm Gomez, Radford, & Rome, LLP , in an email interview.?
• AI will soon supplement crime analysis. "By streamlining data collection and interpretation, crime analysis teams will have more time to be proactive and develop new strategies in response to data findings," Marcus Claycomb CPM , a retired member of the Melbourne, Fla., police department and current business development manager at IT professional services firm Panasonic Connect tells InformationWeek .
• Another AI-enabled technology -- facial recognition -- using private surveillance or public cameras, can help law enforcement identify suspects or missing persons.
• It's important to note that while AI can greatly assist law enforcement, it should never be considered as a replacement for human judgment, especially when someone's freedom is potentially on the line, Rome says.

Latest Major Tech Layoff Announcements

Original Story by Jessica C. Davis, Updated by Brandon Taylor

Key Points:

• As COVID drove everyone online, tech companies hired like crazy. Now, we are hitting the COVID tech bust as tech giants shed jobs by the thousands.
• Updated July 20, 2024 with layoff announcements from Magic Leap, Mercari US, Aqua Security, SolarEdge Technologies, and Salesforce.
• Check back regularly for updates to our IT job layoffs tracker.

Commentary of the Week

Story by William McKnight

Key Points:

• In today's data-driven landscape, businesses face an unprecedented explosion of diverse data types, necessitating a vast array of database options to handle specific workloads.
• Operational databases manage daily transactions, time series databases track sensor data, analytical databases support data exploration, graph databases map relationships, data lakes house raw data, master data stores hold core business information, ERP systems manage resources, and caching databases enable fast response times.
• While utilizing multiple databases can address specific needs, it also introduces significant interoperability, administrative, and cost challenges. Multi-model databases offer a promising solution.
• When evaluating multi-model databases, IT leaders should look for attributes like automatic data updates across models, global deployment capabilities, cross-model data processing languages and optimizers, and robust security features to protect sensitive data.

Podcast of the Week

Podcast and Story by Joao-Pierre Ruth

Key Points:

• There was much talk of artificial intelligence, generative AI (GenAI) in particular, at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit New York conference, especially in relation to the use of cloud resources to further its spread and development.
• Other aspects of the cloud naturally need their time in the spotlight, even if they are not the shiniest tech on the market right now that gobbles up attention.
• Does AI take up too much spotlight in cloud? Should other aspects of the cloud get the same level of interest that GenAI now enjoys?
• In this episode of DOS Won’t Hunt, Erik Peterson , founder and CTO of CloudZero , and Doug Houghton , director of channels with Alkira, Inc. , share some of their takeaways from the conference -- including thoughts on elements of the keynote by AWS Vice President of AI Products Matt Woods, what enterprises look for in their cloud deployments and resources, and what drove some of the conversations they had while on site.

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