Microsoft outage 'dress rehearsal' for cyber warfare — expert

SYDNEY, July 19. /TASS/. For Canberra, the global disruption of Microsoft services acted as a kind of "dress rehearsal" for a potential cyber war, Australian information technology expert Richard Buckland said.

"It is playing out how an attack would play out. We could be getting a taste now, even if it is just a dress rehearsal for what a cyber warfare or cyber terror attack would look like. We’ve not really seen those in Australia yet, this is new for us all, so this is a good rehearsal," he told ABC.

He emphasized that the disruption was not deliberate. The expert cited preliminary assessments by authorities and the fact that hackers and fraudsters usually make demands before attacking IT systems or immediately after they are breached.

Australia became one of the first countries to report the widespread disruption. It affected the work of airports, banks, and payment systems. Photos of stores closed due to technical problems are circulating on social media.

Another cybersecurity expert Alastair MacGibbon explained that Australia was one of the first and most affected countries because of the time gap with the US. The US started fixing the problem when it was evening and fewer people were working on their computers, while Australia saw the peak of the outage in the morning business hours.

Throughout the day, there have been reports of massive outages of Windows-based computer devices from different countries. Leading international banks, air carriers, media outlets and companies in a number of other industries reported disruptions. The American developer of information security solutions CrowdStrike confirmed to CNBC that there is a connection between the latest update of its antivirus software and widespread failures in the Windows OS. The company added that its specialists are working on a forced rollback of the application to an earlier version.

Microsoft later said that the root cause of the global technology outage had been resolved, but some systems in the Microsoft 365 cloud platform may still experience problems.