Global IT outage will happen again, warns former cyber chief

A global IT outage is likely to occur again unless governments and industry work together to “design out” technological flaws, according to Professor Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

Professor Martin said the worst of the outage was over but countries would “have to learn to cope” with future flaws.

“Until governments and the industry get together and work out how to design out some of these flaws, I’m afraid we are likely to see more of these again,” he told Sky News.

“Within countries like the UK and elsewhere in Europe, you can try and build up that national resilience to cope with this. But ultimately, a lot of this is going to be determined in the US.

“If there’s going to be regulation to try and iron out these flaws, it’ll probably have to come from the US and there’s not a great deal that we can do about that.

“So unless and until the structure of the way we do tech changes, we’re going to have to learn to cope with these things, rather than eliminate them.”

Hackers using outage to attack users

Elsewhere, cybersecurity watchdogs have raised the alarm over malicious websites claiming to fix glitches in the wake of the attack.

The FT reports that US, UK and Australian cyber defence agencies have all issued warnings over the weekend against increased phishing activity exploiting the incident.

“A number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover from the widespread outages caused by the CrowdStrike technical incident,” said the Australian Cyber Security Centre.

The US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency said that hackers were trying to “leverage” the outage to conduct malicious activity, including the distribution of a ZIP archive file that appeared to be targeting CrowdStrike users based in Latin America.

Additionally, the UK’s NCSC said that “an increase in phishing referencing this outage has already been observed [ . . . ] aimed at both organisations and individuals”.

Disruption set to continue for NHS

Disruption to GPs caused by the global outage may continue into the coming week, NHS England has said.

A spokesman for the health service told the BBC that digital systems for GPs and pharmacies had been restored “in most areas” – but that surgeries would have to work through a backlog of appointments.

Practices across the UK have had to cancel routine appointments because of the issue, while pharmacies have been unable to access digital prescription records.

Meanwhile, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on Friday issued a message to anyone receiving benefits in the UK. It confirmed its services are unaffected by the IT outage. Services are “running as normal”, the department said in a message on social media.