After mega-breakdown

“A simple update paralyzed the whole world”

Anexia CEO Alexander Windbichler: "A simple update paralyzed the world."

(Bild: Tragner Christian)

The cybersecurity company Crowdstrike has huge problems, affecting numerous Windows systems around the world. Alexander Windbichler from Klagenfurt, who has to fend off hundreds of thousands of hacker attacks every day at his IT company Anexia, tries to explain the problems.

"Krone": Anexia works with clouds worldwide from Carinthia. What exactly happened at Crowdstrike?
Alexander Windbichler: A simple update at Crowdstrike caused the problems. An error occurred with the virus protection. The software is a program or a set of programs that are used to operate a computer. Everything comes to a standstill. TV stations and airports are affected, operations in hospitals can no longer be carried out. The problem has penetrated to the IT foundation.

How does your company Anexia deal with hacker attacks on a day-to-day basis?
We work with clouds and have branches all over the world. There are 500,000 attacks on every internet address every day. And our company has hundreds of thousands of Internet addresses. We have our own specially trained teams to combat this.

How can you defend yourself against this?
90 percent of hacker attacks are caused by the human factor: through phishing emails and hackers who disguise themselves as IT employees and connect a USB stick to the PC. You should be careful who you let onto your computer. You should also use a different password everywhere. There are good tools for this.

How can you solve the Crowdstrike update problem?
There are simple programs that can turn it off. Each company has to edit the computers, but the programs are no longer accessible. In principle, such damage can be rectified within hours. But you need a lot of staff to solve it. That's why it can take longer.

How much is the damage?
Many billions of euros. Austrian companies are also affected. Europe must defend itself. If, for example, the clouds from America, which Anexia also works with, are no longer permitted in Europe, everything will collapse on our continent. That's when the mess starts.

What can we learn from the IT outage?
This outage is an awareness-raising measure. We need to think about what each individual person and company would be missing in a specific case. In Europe, we generally need to make sure that we become more sovereign. And this is where IT is relevant.

You work with Netflix and co. and are also active globally. How do you guarantee security?
We offer our customers infrastructure in the network. All Austrians stumble across our services several times a day while surfing. Security must be an integral part and must be considered with every mouse click. Various teams are working on this issue and detect cyber anomalies using artificial intelligence and mathematical sequences.

Let's come back to the current IT glitch. In your opinion, did the head of CrowdStrike react appropriately?
It all went a bit badly. The communication was as if Microsoft was to blame. However, it was the fault of the CrowdStrike software. But you could tell: The communication was not prepared for this. Crisis management is an important issue here.