Five Questions with Cyber Security Expert Jordan Rae Kelly

Today, we awoke to news of a global Microsoft outage, the result of what was expected to be a routine update. So far, known impacts include airline travel, banks, hospitals, and law enforcement. The court system in Maryland was forced to close statewide. At one point, Delta, United, and American Airlines flights were all grounded. The Starbucks App that lets customers order ahead didn’t work. Some local TV stations couldn’t get on the air. On the more serious end of the spectrum, some hospital work was interrupted, like a patient whose heart surgery didn’t happen.

It happened because there was a flaw in the update that CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity technology company, pushed out. CrowdStrike provides antivirus software to Microsoft for its Windows devices, which means Microsoft users around the world were impacted. Although the update was part of the protection against cyber breaches and hacks, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz issued a statement explaining that this was human error, not a cyber attack.

For many users, it looked like the “blue screen of death.”

Tonight, our guest for “Five Questions” is Jordan Rae Kelly, a Senior Managing Director and the Head of Cybersecurity for the Americas at FTI Consulting. Jordan has more than 15 years of experience coordinating incident response and managing cyber policy planning. Currently, she advises clients on a broad range of cybersecurity and data privacy matters involving breaches, insider threats, intellectual property, crisis communications, vendor management, compliance, regulation, risk management, and forensic investigations. Before that, she served as the Director for Cyber Incident Response on the National Security Council at the White House. We are incredibly lucky to have her with us the day of this outage to help us understand what’s going on.

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