Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said it had issued a "fix" and was working with those who were impacted by an astonishingly widespread Microsoft outage that affected internet connectivity around the globe.
Banking customers, travelers at airports and even customers paying at restaurants were affected early Friday, causing shock and alarm in cities worldwide.
David Malicoat, host of the Professional CISO Podcast said there were already scammers working to take advantage of the chaos, causing CrowdStrike to issue an alert warning people to be sure they were communicating with CrowdStrike directly and not anyone else.
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Warnings were issues about domain names that were registered to mimic the look and feel of a support website to phish for critical information and scam customers.
Malicoat said CrowdStrike is the largest entity in its space, and said the company has a good track record for protecting large systems.
While hospitals and banks worked frantically to get services back up and running during the massive outage, it was airlines who seemed to take a particularly hard punch, given the nature of their responsibility to move people around the globe.
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"In the end, if they are that popular, now you're going to see them across this critical infrastructure of businesses, organizations, and so when that comes down we may have to get to a position where we start doing some variety. We're trying to spread out this risk," Malicoat said of CrowdStrike's massive cybersecurity undertaking. "So, maybe it's a case of one airline uses one of the best tools, and maybe the other airline uses the other one and we're spreading out this risk."
On Friday morning, multiple U.S. airlines had to ground all flights because of the massive outage. Southwest Airlines and JetBlue issued statements saying that they were not impacted by the outage, Scripps News reported on Friday.
