KEN KIRSCHENBAUM, ESQ
ALARM - SECURITY INDUSTRY LEGAL EMAIL NEWSLETTER / THE ALARM EXCHANGE
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Follow up on CrowdStike computer outage shutting down central stations
August 7, 2024
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Follow up on computer outage shutting down central stations from article on July 19, 2024
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Ken,
After reading your email on the problems with CrowdStrike I felt compelled to send you an email about this, let me preface this with yesterday at Rapid Response we had no internal issues and that 100% of our systems were up and with no remote operators everything was contained, and it was business as usual.
Over my 45 years in the industry I have seen many things fail, everything from fiber cuts, manholes filled to brim with water to outages of major suppliers of alarm signal delivery and now this is the third time a giant cyber company has either been hacked or created a catastrophic event.
The one thing I have learned about all these incidents is that everything is subject to failures, that’s just a reality we have to accept but what we can do is to look at systems, communication methods, carriers, power and processes and identify all the things where if something fails what will it do to my life, business, process or customers and then engineer ways to mitigate the failure.
The other thing we need to do is to look at suppliers and do the same thing, yesterday there were four or five large providers of alarm transport platforms that had failures and alarm traffic was unable to get to the monitoring centers, even though we have the ability to engineer and provide multiple paths and ways to get signals many systems didn’t have the ability to do that. I have also been told that several monitoring centers were impacted on top of that.
You can extend this to the panel problems that we have with WiFi and Cell Jammers that are quickly becoming a problem, we have the ability to create additional paths to take care of the outages. We need to carefully look at every part and piece of our business and learn from these outages and see where these single points of failures exist and do our best to mitigate or reduce the risks as much as possible. Our industry is here to protect life and property and we need to keep this in mind at every step of the way and every decision we make, take the time and deep dive into this, make sure that your providers are using layers of redundancy both logical but also physical and are in a position to manage the failure, it’s just a matter of time before the next one.
I want to illustrate the mindset it takes and I am always being accused of being the proverbial Boy Scout with two or three of everything but its worked for me, at my home there are basic things that I want or need, shelter, communications, food and water. As long as I have those, I am a happy camper and I think most people would agree that these are important, don’t believe me just ask anyone in Texas how the last two weeks have been for those affected by the storm. But what does that really mean to me, so allow me to share, at my home which is in a very rural area of the country I have three sources of power, the first is my entire property runs on solar with enough battery to last a couple of days including HVAC, i also have a large diesel generator capable of running everything for as long as I put fuel in it and two portable generators plus the normal grid. For communications I have not one but two fiber feeds to my home coming from diverse paths from two different providers and if that’s not enough I am a ham radio operator and have radios on every band.
For water I have normal municipal water but I also have a full on river at the edge of my place with a pump already in place and I have a rainwater collection system with 3000 gallons of water in it and probably another 20 gallons of drinking water in bottles. I have 6 refrigerators and freezers full of stuff and enough dry goods to last a very long time and a few hundred gallons of propane for cooking and heat if necessary and when I tell you this I am not a crazy prepper and don’t have a bunker or something like that it’s just things I have done because I have seen the failures and understand how to work around them and we have to take the same steps in our business.
In the 45 years of being in the crazy business I have seen so many failures and been through enough disasters that belts and suspenders is just how I roll, anyone that knows me understands that’s just how my mind works. Just remember the saying one is none and two is one, three is better. With summer starting to wrap up there is typically a lull in work so take some of this time and really evaluate every aspect of your business, your suppliers and how you sell and install systems. Just say to yourself what happens if X fails or is compromised and make decisions to make it better. It won’t happen overnight, my home certainly didn’t but as I did things I made choices that fell in line with avoiding single points of failures.
Glad we got though this outage and have a good weekend.
Morgan Hertel, VP of Technology and Innovation
Rapid Response Monitoring
www.rrms.com
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Response
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As I write this the airline industry [and I don’t know who else] is just recovering from the outage, but not just yet. I haven’t heard anything about the alarm industry. During the outage I believe I heard that 911 was not affected.
If you have any stores about missed signals let us know.
I can’t help but think about the central stations who permit workers to work from home. I don’t know whether the outage affected them differently. There are two serious problem with finding out about that.
First, other than one central station during a K&K webinar, not one central station has fessed up to allowing work from home, and none that I know of are bragging about it or even letting their dealers know about the practice, let alone what issues they have encountered, overcome or still face.
I’m not advocating a position on this topic of work from home. I think it adds to risk, but I suppose there are counter arguments in favor of the practice. What I find odd is that none of the central stations who permit the practice seem to talk about it, promote it, let alone brag about it using it as a selling tool to promote their central station. It seems to me the topic deserves some discussion; some transparency [I use synonymously with honest].
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Ken Kirschenbaum,Esq
Kirschenbaum & Kirschenbaum PC
Attorneys at Law
200 Garden City Plaza
Garden City, NY 11530
516 747 6700 x 301
ken@kirschenbaumesq.com
www.KirschenbaumEsq.com
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