Microsoft outage | Dallas News Live

Now we do want to bring in Janardan Meyer. He is the CEO of Protech. That is a private investigations firm based here in Frisco. Sir, thank you so much for being here today. I want to get right into it. Microsoft says some servers failed. So in plain English, what does that mean? It can mean a thousand things. I think everybody immediately assumes it means a cyber attack, and that's not actually the case. I'd say there's two important key takeaways here, understanding what outage reports actually tell us, and recognizing just how dependent we are on the systems that failed. For instance, down detector is a useful early warning tool. It identifies unusual increases in people reporting problems, but those reports alone don't establish where the failure originated. For example, let's say you're using Google through Outlook. You might report a Google problem, even though the issue could actually be with Outlook or the connection between them. It's a hypothetical example, but illustrates why complaints about several companies don't automatically mean several independent outages of which we did see problems with. And the number of reports isn't the same as the total number of people affected. I think the bigger concern is, It's dependence on shared infrastructure, if your email, meetings, files and backup communications all depend on the same provider, one failure can disrupt your entire operation. Yeah, I mean, it was unbelievable yesterday. So many of us here at Fox 4 in the newsroom, we were scrambling around. You suddenly realize how important email is when you don't have it. Fortunately, we have a program called Slack that a lot of people are familiar with. So we're able to communicate back and forth that way and get information. But some users were still having trouble today as services were coming back online. I'm curious, what does it take to verify that a system is fully restored? So verifying something's fully restored is actually quite difficult. It is done in stages, first of all. As you can see, parts of Microsoft are coming back on, parts are still having problems. The other issue becomes that you're relying on one system totally instead of having a backup. And that's what I think has really been the issue here, is everyone's realizing everything was reliant on Microsoft and they didn't actually have something else to fall back on, right? So that's, I think that's the biggest lesson to learn. So we actually at my company provide threat and vulnerability assessments to help organizations identify weaknesses like that and develop practical contingency plans. Security includes keeping your business functioning when the systems you depend on become unavailable. You know that's smart and I don't know what we would have done yesterday if we didn't have Slack to fall back on. So what I'm assuming and hearing from you is that organizations moving forward need to diversify their communications methods. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket with Microsoft If it goes down, you're really up a creek. Absolutely. And the other thing I would suggest is a couple little things that are like, what should businesses do now? I would say confirm an alternate communication method, make essential information available securely and test the plan. So I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you there. So I know you made it clear this wasn't a cyber attack, a cyber attack. What evidence helps investigators determine whether something caused by technical failures or an actual intrusion? So when there's an intrusion, there's things left behind that they can detect and they can see, right? And so when they don't see any evidence of any digital trail, if you would, for the layman, is how I would call that. And when they don't see evidence of those digital trails, they assume that it's not a cyber attack. It's not 100% guarantee that that isn't. Really, really good hackers and really good cyber attackers can circumvent almost anything. You know, I think the key takeaways are what should a business do, confirm an alternate communication method, make essential information available security, test your plan. Should everyone switch service providers? No, every provider can have outages. The goal is to make sure you fall back on function independently. And a backup plan only works if it survives the same failure that took down your primary system. So here's a good question. During an outage, employees may switch to their personal email, personal phones to send information. That could be dangerous because you're not behind your company's firewall. So what do you recommend there in trying to remain productive but being sort of chained with your limited ability? And it's depending on how far you're willing to go. For instance, are you wanting to have more than one service provider that can get expensive? Do you want to have an in-house backup for things, right? Something you said earlier about Slack, there are great programs out there that provide very, very strong functioning messaging systems and business systems, and Slack is one of the best ones. I recommend everybody have something like that implemented and in place because it's not a matter of if this is gonna happen again, it's just a matter of when. So I don't know if you've already sort of addressed this. What is the single question that every business owner should ask their IT team after an outage like this? Is it the diversification? As we've discussed, is there one particular issue that someone needs to ask their IT team leader? I think the main thing is do we have a backup plan that works if we have an outage, right? Basically, will it survive the same failure that took down your main? So if your backup needs to not rely on any of the same things that your main system does, because if it does and it goes down, so is your backup plan. So having backups for both in terms of your internet possibilities and your basic program possibilities are something that are absolutely necessary these days. So what about getting back in? Sometimes when we get booted out of a system, then we have to re-authenticate ourselves. So for instance, if you were kicked out of Outlook, would you get an email? What if someone gets an email telling you to sign back in after an outage like this? I imagine there are the standard steps you have to take to make sure that it's legitimate and it's not some phishing operation. Definitely want to make sure it's legitimate, the level of where scams are. I mean, I received a scam from FedEx the other day, and this is quite literally my job. And it almost got me, someone that works in this realm. And it was such a complicated, it took me to a website that was identical to FedEx. So you definitely want to be very, very careful when accepting an email. One thing you can use is if you have your phone and you have AI programs like ChatGPT or things like that, is you can take pictures of these, enter them into your phone, add Ask AI what it thinks of these programs and again, you want to have your phone on a separate system as well so that you can connect either via Wi-Fi or use your service provider. But using AI to kind of test these systems and understand or test these things like is this scam, is this fraud, can really help you determine if something is because they have gotten more and more elaborate as the years have gone on. So I've got about a minute left to my last question for you is let's let's talking about critical infrastructure. It's like a hospital utility, a city government. What is the difference between getting its computers back online and getting essential services back up and running? Because as we know, government offices use Microsoft as well. Absolutely. I would say that in situations like that, obviously that needs to be the priority, but they usually built in backups that are fully self aware. In other words, If you have a system there that can run on its own, where your intranet, your system that's inside the hospital itself, let's say, is able to continue to move without access to the internet. That all of the devices that they need, things like that are still usable. And again, it comes down to having, it's a funny thing my wife and I say to each other all the time, which is have a backup for your backup. And that is the most important thing that you can do in these situations, specifically for things as important as, say, a hospital, a police station, something like that, where they need people to be able to get hold of them and they need to be able to access information immediately. Well, I always look at things, you've got to learn to move forward. And I think that yesterday's outage and people scrambling around really put some good lessons out there and prepares us for, you know, a potential outage down the future. So some very good eye-opening advice there. Janardan Meyer, CEO of Protect, good for you to stop by the show today. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.