November rundown: CrowdStrike's insider threat

As CrowdStrike grappled with a malicious employee, Cloudflare suffered a major outage

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As a business leader, you’d like to believe that your staff are entirely trustworthy. Effective enterprises run on workforce confidence – but in some cases, that trust can be misplaced.

In November, CrowdStrike admitted one of its own employees had provided screenshots of internal systems to hackers in exchange for a sizable payout. Industry experts have told ITPro the incident should act as a wake up call to the all-too-serious risk of insider threats.

Earlier in the month, websites all over the world went offline after a major outage at the content delivery network service provider Cloudflare. What was the cause of the incident: had Cloudflare fallen victim to the kind of DDoS attack it’s famous for preventing?

In this episode, Jane and Rory welcome back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to explore some of November’s biggest stories.

Highlights

"The individual was believed to have been paid around $25,000 for this, which all things considered, I think, is quite low when you're risking being fired and, you know, a potential jail sentence in the aftermath of this. So these were leaked on Telegram. CrowdStrike, obviously, was made aware of this and they reacted pretty swiftly like we mentioned. That person has since been dismissed, I don't think it was too much of an issue for HR in that situation."

"A lot of organizations still lack formal insider threat programs. It's something that's just not really on their radar because a lot of the time, the headlines are based around you ransomware attacks, malware, etc, etc. And so, you know, when you have an individual in your company that's potentially at risk, how do you deal with that?"

“An outage at Cloudflare, I think, is a worst case scenario for a lot of organizations, a lot of online services."

“The outage itself was a result of a bug in its bot management software. So, the software that essentially allows websites to allow bots onto their individual sites, or prevent bots from accessing their sites, a bug in that service and that software caused this, which created somewhat of a cascading effect where a lot of websites essentially just were bricked for a good couple of hours."

Footnotes

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Rory Bathgate
Rory Bathgate
Features and Multimedia Editor

Rory Bathgate is Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He can also be found co-hosting the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector.

In his free time, Rory enjoys photography, video editing, and good science fiction. After graduating from the University of Kent with a BA in English and American Literature, Rory undertook an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London. He joined ITPro in 2022 as a graduate, following four years in student journalism. You can contact Rory at rory.bathgate@futurenet.com or on LinkedIn.

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