You’re not going to believe this, but there was a lot of misinformation on social media over the weekend after the massive CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage.
As airlines cancelled flights, hospitals had to reschedule patients and some companies just flat-out couldn’t work on Friday, people were quick to assume that the outage, which was actually caused by a faulty CrowdStrike Falcon update, was a cyber attack.
Media headlines posed the question: “Cyber attack, or outage?” Social posters quickly assumed this was some sort of “hack.”
On the one hand, I get it. Seeing a “blue screen of death,” often with code that looks indecipherable, has been ingrained into our heads that it’s a “hack,” because that’s how they’ve always been displayed in works of fiction or as the generic image of a “hack” anytime there is actually a real cyber attack.
That’s not to say there aren’t many lessons to be learned from this outage, and at some point, we’ll be ready to dig into those. But also calling this a cyber attack can spread unnecessary FUD, especially when threat actors are trying to capitalize on the outage to spread malware in massive computer outage weekend cyber attack saying
