Our laptops, desktops and phones, our businesses, data, emails, our access to internet information and services — actually, anything online that traverses cybersecurity and passes through a computer site — are all dependant on support and protection from safety companies whose manpower and software are sometimes inadequate.
Not many can you do to alter that.
Poor players are out there — bright, crafty and generally hidden far from the approach of your local law enforcement, said Jon Powell,  , security analyst and partner , at Atlanta-based finance firm , Moore Colson.
” It is however just the world we live in”, he said. ” I do n’t need to be next door to you to rob you”.
That means all companies need electronic guardians, the way a modern energy flower needs guards. But, companies— and their employees — rely on technology supplied by specialists like , CrowdStrike, an Austin-based company that has become a world leader in protecting organization servers from hacking, theft, manipulation and various cyber disruption.
But the gatekeeper can goof, too.
The guard at the plant gate can fall asleep, get fooled or overpowered by an intruder. Or — as seems to have happened with , CrowdStrike , earlier this month— stumble unintentionally while making his rounds, perhaps cutting off electricity and sending much of the city into darkness.
A mistake can lead to a global issue with a company like CrowdStrike, which happened on July 19 at servers all over the world when CrowdStrike allegedly distributed a faulty software update to numerous Microsoft system users.
It was a very big deal, causing inconvenience and costing billions, but it could have been so much worse.
Airline scheduling was disrupted, particularly for Delta Air Lines, and many thousands of passengers stranded, but no in-air passengers were imperiled. Some hospitals revoked non-urgent surgeries because they had lost access to computer systems.
Many supermarkets and other businesses lost their transaction systems, so customers could n’t pay for items. Some logistics firms had to delay some packages ‘ delivery, but the impact was fatal.
In many ways, our tech systems are chains and we depend on all the links, said Zarik Megerdichian,  , CEO of Loop8, a California-based company that sells personal privacy controls for software.
This event serves as a cautionary tale for the issues a single point of failure may lead, he said. We discovered that even the largest players we all know and trust are vulnerable, and that even the weakest link can be as secure as a business. In many ways, companies got off easy”.
At Georgia Power, for example, the CrowdStrike outage did n’t disrupt electricity service for its 2.7 million customers, even though the company’s online support and account access functions were impaired. By Monday, those services had been restored, but the technology meltdown’s effects continued into the first half of this week.
The utility is always busy on Monday, but a Georgia Power spokesman claimed the company was experiencing higher than usual call volumes to begin the week. The number of calls was probably caused by customers being temporarily unable to resolve issues or schedule service through the company’s online portals on July 19, according to a spokesman.
Georgia Power halted electricity service interruptions for several days due to issues and a backlog. The business had resumed disconnecting customers due to nonpayment of bills as of Wednesday.
However, those kind of tech troubles might just be foreshadowing.
There’s reason to fear that next time, the shutdown systems, inaccessible records and off-line computers could be mortal threats and not just inconveniences, said , Aleksandar Tomic, associate dean, strategy, innovation, and technology at Boston College.
He said,” It gives you an idea of how warfare would operate in the future.” This is a representation of what it might be like if we started a conflict with Russia. We were lucky this time that no vital systems were affected, like water”.
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