It's been described as the largest IT outage in history.
U.S. air carriers were hit especially hard. Their business is real-time and affected instantly when workers could not use their computers. This disrupted travel all across the world.
I was asked last Friday why the impact was so severe. The only way to fix an affected machine required an IT tech to physically address each machine one on one. There was no magical way to roll out the fix automatically.
Yesterday Delta announced it was hiring a law firm to seek damage from CrowdStrike and Microsoft after suffering over a half billion in losses. The CEO of Delta was on CNBC yesterday, 07/31/24. He said that Delta had over 40,000 servers and each server required a visit by a tech to resolve the problem affirming what I mentioned above.
CrowdStrike is also being sued by its stock shareholders following a sharp drop in share price.
Computer security is a vital necessity in today's online cyber world and now our government is banning one of the best.
Kaspersky announces withdrawal from U.S. Market. It is a victim of the ongoing Russian-Ukraine conflict.
Kaspersky security software will no longer keep a U.S. division for marketing its security software. The White House announced a ban on the sale, resale and licensing of any Kaspersky products and services.
The Commerce Department alleges that the company and its products present a national security risk due to the Russia's ongoing cyber warfare.
Following a review of Kaspersky’s cybersecurity transactions and services, the Bureau of Industry and Security found that they posed “unacceptable risks to the United States' national security and the security and safety of its people.” Specifically, BIS concluded that the risk factors involved were threats posed by the Russian Federation, vulnerabilities created by Kaspersky products for national security and the impact of Russia exploiting them.
Kaspersky offered to allow a 3rd party access to its code in an attempt to prove it's code is not being used for cyber warfare to no avail.
My own experience with Kaspersky is that it has kept my customers safe. I aided one customer whose MindSpring email account had been suspended due to generating spam. Their computers were protected by Malwarebytes. MindSpring indicated that one of the computer was infected by a Trojan. The scan performed by Malwarebytes came back okay, no malicious objects detected. However, upon installing Kaspersky, the Trojan was found and eliminated with the first scan.
Although the Biden administration has said there will be no legal repercussions to businesses or individuals who continue to use KAV, updates will not be available after September 30th, 2024.
