SCRANTON, Pa. — Lanes were grounded, banks offline, media outlets off air, and hospitals left to cancel procedures after a worldwide IT outage on Friday. Officials with CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, say the company sent out an update to Microsoft Windows that sent systems across the world into disarray.
"Well, now with the cyber issue over the last 24 hours we have millions and millions of people who are affected just like that and across all different sectors," said Mike Jenkins, PhD, University of Scranton.
Dr. Mike Jenkins, the chair of the Criminal Justice and Cybersecurity Department at the University of Scranton, says outages like this one can disrupt the lives of thousands, if not millions, of people worldwide.
"It's just a harm that we see that is not similar in the physical world, and so when we have the bridge collapse in Maryland a few months ago, that was a major event, and the same questions were being asked about how this occurred and whether it was a malicious actor and we talked about the millions of people that will be affected in their daily lives."
Jenkins says interconnected software like Microsoft Windows becomes more and more fragile as technology continues to advance.
"So it makes it that much more difficult to come up with the laws to govern this kind of infrastructure or the policy that would keep us safe."
Jenkins says it is ultimately the responsibility of every company to create a safety net, as an IT outage like this one can erase everything in the blink of an eye.
"It takes human behavioral change to keep ourselves safe and to protect ourselves. It takes new policy and new understanding of how to protect ourselves and how to set up the systems in a way that are going to be safest for everyone. Again whether it be from a malicious actor or from just some kind of other bug in the system."