On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike notified its customers that a failed CrowdStrike Falcon content update for Windows Hosts caused a massive outage to government-, health-, and business-services around the world. 

Votiro and its services were not affected by the Microsoft-CrowdStrike outages. We continue to closely monitor the situation and offer our support to customers and partners as they recover from this business disruption.  

As individuals and organizations recover from this outage, we offer the following guidance to security leaders and officials in enterprises and government agencies.

1. Be Especially Vigilant

CISA warns that threat actors have launched malicious malware phishing attacks and links to prey on individuals and organizations seeking information and solutions, tricking them to click on contaminated links under the guise of offering updates or fixes for CrowdStrike-related issues. Do not click on any links received via email or SMS.  Directly visit the CrowdStrike website for the latest updates. 

2. Adopt Layered Defenses

Layered defense is the foundation for cybersecurity. While concentrated platforms can be useful to drive efficiency, over reliance can be catastrophic when something goes wrong. Nothing can guarantee a mistake or failure won’t happen, but this IT disruption, the biggest in history, is demonstrating the risk of concentration in too few technologies and platforms. 

A message from Aviv Grafi, Votiro CTO, to our customers using CrowdStrike and Votiro: “No instances of successful targeted attacks have been reported and none are expected. Safety from phishing and malicious links is unaffected during this recovery period.”

— Ravi Srinivasan, CEO