Gerstell: Global IT outage “could be the largest cyber incident of all time”

(NewsNation) — Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel for the National Security Agency, said the global technology outage shows how “we have allowed vulnerabilities to creep into the system.”

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said it identified and was fixing the “flaw” in a software update it distributed to Microsoft Windows customers. The flaw crashed hundreds of thousands of computers overnight and paralyzed airlines, hospitals, banks and other businesses around the world.

“One of those big vulnerabilities is concentration,” Gerstell said Friday during an appearance on NewsNation’s “The Hill.” “This could turn out to be the biggest cyber and computer incident ever in terms of actual impact on people’s lives.”

George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, said customers remain “fully protected,” adding that the company recognizes the seriousness of the situation and deeply regrets any inconvenience and disruption.

“We are working with all affected customers to ensure systems are back up and running and able to provide the services their customers count on,” Kurtz continued in a recent update. “As previously mentioned, the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed. There was an issue with a Falcon content update for Windows hosts.”

Many CrowdStrike customers had to manually repair their systems, a time-consuming task that prolonged the outage.

NewsNation’s Bobby Oler and Devan Markham contributed to this report.