ORLANDO, Fla. – “We have to get into the computer to the application and pull out the bad file,” said News 6 Assistant Director of Technology Erving Vanags.
Our IT specialists here at News 6 have worked around the clock.
“It infected our news editing system so we had to get around that for our news in the morning and at noon,” said Vanags.
Millions in our country and across the globe went to work and saw these blue screens and notices to repair their computers. It’s all due to an update by CrowdStrike which malfunctioned.
CrowdStrike is a cyber security company that created software to protect viruses from several businesses across the globe.
This update caused so many of those businesses to run into problems like airports, banks, Starbucks and even here at News 6.
“It wasn’t really a virus. It was an application made to eradicate that failed to work. We’ve had viruses before but we were able to contain them. This one took off by itself and we had to chase it around,” said Vanags.
Several of our IT specialists went to each computer to check and see if they were affected by the update. When you have hundreds of computers in your business, fixing a problem like this can take some time.
“Potential where the software is removed and not replaced, you could leave your company and your data vulnerable,” said Danny Jenkins with ThreatLocker.
ThreatLocker, a different cyber security company, says this is one of the biggest outages in recent history.
Jenkins said companies will most likely focus on getting the most critical systems back up and running and other systems like the ones that control payroll will be pushed to the back of the line.
“It depends on how many hands you’ve got but it’s a manual process. If you do 10-15 minutes per PC and do 10 at a time. It’s gonna be slow,” said Jenkins.
Jenkins said those set to get paid Friday could be missing a paycheck for a few days if their employers were impacted.
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