Preparing for the next big outage

This past weekend, around 1 p.m. Saturday, my phone exploded with texts and calls as I returned from the Best and Brightest High School Scholarship Competition in Tallahassee (created by Ron Sachs). Microsoft 365 was down, and people were coming unglued, not knowing at first that it was a global outage and not just them.

To their credit, Microsoft was on it fast and had services restored that same afternoon, but the after-effects lingered on Monday, with phones, tablets, and other devices no longer synced up.

It is, after all, the Legislative Session kickoff week in Tallahassee, so people are on edge, diving in, ready to fix our state’s issues. They are not ready for an outage. But are we ever truly prepared for a cyber incident?

Last year’s outage with CrowdStrike on July 19 was brutal, especially if you were at the airport or in an impacted hospital. Their software situation had people stranded at airports for days in some cases.

During that incident, over 72 hours, 4% of all flights worldwide were canceled, totaling approximately 16,000 flights. That is as bad as it gets in the modern era.

This year, it’s not just outages we must fear; let’s continue our tech roundup of issues in the tech sector.

What happens when North Koreans steal $1 billion in cryptocurrency? All the sanctions in the world won’t matter if your hacking team can pull in a billion a pop to fund whatever it is they need in North Korea.

The current leadership seems to be all about nukes and Ferraris, so I am sure this will help on both fronts.

How did they pull it off? It appears the hacking team in North Korea, which is backed by the state, stole directly from the digital currency exchange called Bybit. Brutal.

Also, fake toll texts are running rampant on a smaller scale here in Florida.

If you receive a text message notice that your toll is unpaid, do not click, and do not give them your credit card number or password. This is a scam.

If you have questions about unpaid tolls or tolls in general, call them directly.

Additionally, it is tax season and the Legislative Session — two significant busy seasons running concurrently in Florida. Be extra cautious of social engineering texts, phone calls, and emails from hackers trying to trick you into giving them your passwords and financial information.

Pick up the phone and call the person in the email on a number not in the email to verify payments before becoming a victim. This could include wire transfers or gift card requests disguised as legislative briefs, events, fake IRS notices, unpaid bills—anything that might get you to click. Do not click.

What can you do to be ready for an outage or cyber incident?

Have a redundant data backup in the cloud and on another device. For those who save things only on your laptop, this means you. For your email, please confirm with your IT professional that they are backing up your email. Microsoft does not do that for you; you must back up your email.

Also, have a secondary email address ready for messaging in a crisis — a Gmail account for emergencies if Outlook goes down, for example.

For internet connections at your office, you need to have a primary and secondary connection that auto-failover.

Also, a cellular device can be used for additional connectivity in a severe (hurricane) situation.

For power, have a solar charger, generator, or some plan to keep it powered up in the event of a disaster. Have multiple devices — phone, tablet, and laptop — along with your desktop to ensure device failure is never an issue. Finally, in front of all these things, have multiple cybersecurity tools to ensure your defensive posture is strong and a robust password unique for each place you visit online.

Outages and cyber incidents will happen. The only question will be whether you follow the best practices.

You will either come unglued like a gingerbread house at Christmas or be ready to rock with redundancy and security at every possible level.

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