* By Francisco Camargo
In the context of cybersecurity, “resilience risks” refer to the ability of digital systems to protect themselves against attacks and recover quickly from failures. In a highly interconnected world where businesses and infrastructures are integrally dependent on technology, inadequate preparation can result in significant disruptions, reputational damage and financial losses.
Effective resilience strategies include incident response plans, robust backup systems, and rapid recovery practices to ensure continuity of operations.
CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity company, recently experienced a failure in updating its Falcon system, exposing the complexity and challenges of cyber resilience. The failure occurred due to the release of an update without thorough testing, highlighting the difficulty of balancing speed and accuracy in security solutions. This underscores the importance of systems that allow native rollback, allowing revert to previous versions in the event of issues.
Systems that depend on attack identification and signatures need to be updated almost in real time, forcing the supplier to make a trade off between updating as quickly as possible or exhaustively testing the update.
In the United States, the “blackout” affected airlines such as American Airlines and Delta, causing disruptions and highlighting the risks associated with failures in digital security systems. This can lead to potential lawsuits and high costs for companies, putting the civil liability of software manufacturers in the spotlight, especially in a country where litigation involves significant sums. In Brazil, despite the limited impact, the incident caused companies, especially in the financial sector, to reevaluate their security strategies. There was a growing demand for rollback and recovery solutions, as well as discussions about the importance of contingency plans and rapid response to failures. The episode reinforced the need to diversify and customize cybersecurity approaches, without relying solely on big names in the sector.
The incident also highlighted the importance of clear communication during crises to preserve customer trust and mitigate reputational damage. What happened to CrowdStrike, which led to major image challenges and eventual financial losses, could happen to other vendors, who learned a lot from the incident. In similar cases, companies should prioritize transparency as they work to restore trust in their systems.
The discovery that the threat may be in the solution has made the task of CISOs even more complex, as they now have to worry about the problems that can be generated by security solutions. As the world moves towards an increasingly interconnected digital environment, the lessons learned are crucial to strengthening global cyber resilience. Software vendors must balance innovation with security, ensuring the ability to recover quickly from incidents. Resilience risks emerge as the new frontier of cybersecurity, requiring a paradigm shift that prioritizes adaptability and rapid response to meet the challenges of an ever-evolving digital world. And, once again, it has become clear that the virtual world is closely connected to our physical world.
*Francisco Camargo, CEO of CLM and vice-president of the Board of the Brazilian Association of Software Companies (ABES)
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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