Bitkom and BSI launch survey on the Crowdstrike outage

After a faulty update of the Crowdstrike security software caused numerous Windows computers to crash worldwide on July 19, the digital association Bitkom and the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) are launching a survey aimed at companies. Among other things, the survey asks how companies were affected by the incident, whether they have contingency plans in place and what measures have been taken or are planned for the future.

"According to initial estimates, there was talk of insurance losses amounting to 1.5 billion dollars. Individual consequences and the damage to the German economy are currently difficult to estimate due to a lack of objective data," says the BSI.

Developing measures to prevent similar incidents

According to BSI President Claudia Plattner, every participation in the survey helps to "assess the consequences of the outage and develop measures to prevent similar incidents". To this end, the BSI is in close contact with Crowdstrike and Microsoft.

"The BSI will also hold talks with other software manufacturers and develop the measures accordingly. Among other things, the aim is to design and implement new and resilient components that offer the same functionality and protection as before, but require less far-reaching intervention rights in the operating systems. This should minimize the impact of any software errors," explains Plattner.

The survey is being conducted by Bitkom Research on behalf of the BSI and Bitkom and will run until August 21. Participation is anonymous and takes about ten minutes. Interested companies can leave their e-mail address to receive the results once the evaluation is complete.

(mack)