As most in the industry are aware, a defective content update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor for Windows led to a global cascade of system outages affecting critical industry sectors such as transportation, banking, healthcare, and public safety. Many enterprises and government agencies around the world are still actively managing their response to this incident.

In the early hours of July 19th, 2024, CrowdStrike endpoints on Windows machines worldwide received a faulty content update, causing what is shaping up to be the one of the largest global IT outages to date. All over the world reports of Windows workstations and servers stuck in a boot loop with a BSOD were pouring in, impacting airlines, airports, banks, hospitals and many other critical infrastructures such as emergency services call centers, and the list goes on.

Phishing is used to completely compromise the victim’s environment after other repeated methods failed.

New data puts the spotlight on the frequency and impact of modern ransomware attacks, highlighting the overconfidence organizations are showing in their ability to defend and respond to attacks. If you’re like one of the organizations surveyed in Halcyon’s latest Ransomware CISO Survey report, the findings were quite eye opening.

IT asset management (ITAM) is a structured system for organizing, provisioning, deploying, maintaining, and deprovisioning business assets. It allows organizations to keep track of IT assets like hardware and software systems, as well as the data those systems process.

Last year, 95% of organizations faced some kind of data outage or disruption. The impact of these incidents was overwhelming, with an average cost of $1.7 million per incident. This statistic shows how important it is for organizations to have a data safety plan. Organizations need robust measures to ensure data resiliency and effective disaster recovery. One such solution is cloud-to-cloud restore. Backup is the key to recovering and restoring your data in such scenarios.

On Wednesday night, the Indian cryptocurrency platform WazirX experienced a significant cyberattack, resulting in the theft of at least $230 million worth of cryptocurrency. The breach was first detected by several blockchain security companies, including Elliptic, Arkham, and BlockSec. These firms observed large amounts of digital coins being siphoned out of WazirX before the platform acknowledged the security breach.

Joint customers utilizing Rubrik for immutable backup are recommended to utilize Rubrik in-place recoveries for impacted Windows VMware Virtual Machines (VMs), standard VM restores for Azure VMs, AWS EC2 instances, and live mounts for Hyper-V and AHV VMs. For VMware VMs this significantly reduces the recovery time by only recovering the changed blocks required to revert the VM to a snapshot before the 04:09 UTC CrowdStrike host update.

When it comes to how employees get work done, personal devices are an ever-growing part of the equation. The 2023 Lookout State of Remote Work Security Report found that 92% of remote workers have performed work tasks on their personal mobile devices. While putting security controls on employer-owned devices is a no-brainer, the increasing overlap of personal with professional means that organizations need to think about how to secure employee-owned devices that are being used for work.