All right, welcome back to the Ottawa studios of Inside Mine. Can you head on your host, Dr. D. And today we're talking topical, right?
What do we have? We have an IT outage from cloud strike. So sit back, grab yourself your favorite beverages. We're going to talk about it.
So by now, everybody, unless you're living under a rock somewhere, or aware that there has been a significant set of outages, this is not a cyber attack, right? This is not a security breach. This is not malfeasance by some nefarious or ill-intended actor in the world. This was simply a demonstration of the interconnectedness and the effect that third parties can have on the operation of the internet.
And we're going to read here from Wall Street Journal's article today entitled Major IT Outage Grounds Flights, Hits Banks, and Businesses Worldwide. And I'm just going to paraphrase what they're saying here. But a massive tech outage swept the globe, knocking out operations for banks, media companies, and emergency services, and forcing airlines to ground flights, exposing the fragility and interdependence of global digital infrastructure. The single update came from cybersecurity software company CrowdStrike, a major provider of malware and virus protection to a large array of companies causing outages for millions of users of Microsoft Windows devices worldwide.
Major airlines were involved, including advisories from the Federal Administration. Windows computers and tablets crashed in countries from the US to China, Australia, with reports of forced restarts of devices spreading across social media. And if you're a Windows follower, you know what I mean. About in the middle of a project, in the middle of some event that's going on, you get a forced restart for some Windows update that is against your control, and you cannot stop it.
It happened to me once in a Windows device during a live event, and ever again will I ever use a Windows device. Congratulations, Microsoft. But that's a different story. Now CrowdStrike, Chief Executive, has come out and said that the identified fix, the identified problems has been identified, they've deployed a fix, and that this is not a security incident or a cyber hack.
But the one thing the Wall Street Journal points out very well, and this is going to be the subject matter what we're talking about today, is that one update from a single company could plunge so many companies from airline check-in desk, to consultants, conference rooms, everything into a digital dark age. It serves as a start warning of the economy's technological dependence and the dangerous consolidation around same tools. Now, basically what we're looking at here is that CrowdStrike is just one of those third-party companies that provides Microsoft a set of services, right? And so they just simply updated their software.
This is not different from what happened a couple of years ago in Canada, when the entire Rogers TV cell phone and internet network was brought to its knees, because they had a third-party company updating regular malware, or updating some background technology and software as part of a regular normal operating procedure, and that because it didn't go as planned, let's just put it that way, that it literally brought down the entire system to its knees. The fact that this is on rinse and repeat, within greater industries, demonstrates that I don't know whether that many people are looking at these third-party effects, let alone looking beyond the efficiency that these third-parties bring. So if they run one system and they run it really well, they end up getting contracts to run it for a whole series of other companies, which by far then extends the fact that this one company, CrowdStrike, had the ability, not intentional, but had the ability to take significant networks down and cause disruption around the world. This is a reflection of your and my dependence on the 10 sectors of critical infrastructure.
And I hammered away on this on today's social media posts, the five that I have up across all social medias for the day, is basically grounded in that your preparedness level is correlated to your dependency on the 10 sectors of critical infrastructure. Now, in the United States of America, there's 16 in the European Union, they use a different number, it doesn't matter. When you look at all the different sectors of society, and you take the time to strategize and look at your dependency on them, and then your exposure to them, and then strategize or wargame what that looks like when that sector of critical infrastructure goes down any impact it can have on you. We start to quickly realize that collectively, we have created a pretty incredible, modern technologically enabled society, that as we're realizing event by event, is actually maintaining its standard on a very narrow knife set, right?
One company was able to bring down a number of systems, not by malware or malfeasance, but just by general, whatever. I'm not gonna call it stupidity, because I don't want a lawsuit. But the point here is, is that as we start to understand that, a good part, a good lens to look through is that you can't control that, right? You're not here to vote on whether we allow companies like Cloud Strike to go on.
And every time the government wants to get involved and stuff like that, it just becomes another bureaucratic nightmare and it's never improved. But the point that I'm making is, is that we understand that this is beyond our control, right? I don't control the internet, I don't control how companies leverage third party software, I don't control what goes on in the background. And in fact, I'm not an IT nerd, I don't understand all of these systems to the greatest and to the degree and that's perfectly fine in the world of preparedness.
Because what I do know is my exposure to the access to the internet. Through the service provider that I choose, the alternate service provider that I have for a different system, my dependency on the cell network and my ability to access the cell network when it's no longer available through a certain service provider. And when you start to sit down and take the time and effort, and I talk about this in preparedness all the time, preparedness is not about spending money, but it is an allocation of time and effort. When you look at your level of exposure and your dependency on these technologically enabled tools, and I make my living, my corporate entity and my social media presence requires the internet and the cell network, right?
Otherwise nobody knows I'm out here. I pay for advertisements on meta. I'm soon to be paying for advertisements on Google, right? I need to tell the world I'm here so that they can interact with me and we can have a great conversation.
That requires the internet to work, but I don't control any of that. What I do control and what you do control is your strategy for when that is no longer available to you. So as the Rogers out in Canada didn't last more than a day or two for most people, right? It was incredibly impactful and it demonstrated to everyone the extent to which they are exposed and what they want to.
Even for example, you've seen some photos from some United States of America airports where they're using paper flip charts to do the arrival notifications. You know how you look up at the board and the IT has the arrivals and the gates and stuff? Well, they're using paper flip charts placed throughout the concourse to tell people where the flights are coming from because they can't do it, right? The same thing happened a couple of weeks ago when an IT outage struck the car industry and took down their ability to use their online systems to create deals and to write up paperwork.
So they got back to the old school idea of creating contracts to purchase cars using pen and paper, right? It's about having a strategy to navigate the world. So we always ask a really important question is, what does your world look like when you lose access to something? So in this case, let's take the internet, right?
What does your world look like when you lose access to the internet? Now, some people are gonna respond, I don't care, because maybe they don't, right? In a personal reflective sense, maybe a couple of days off the internet wouldn't be bad for all of us. However, though, that's just a personal reflection.
I'm gonna ask you now to look at your employment. Where you earn an income. Does that require access to the internet? Because if you work in an internet-based business, for example, which is like in the vast majority of businesses out there, and the internet goes down for three or four days, well, your personal ability to just have some free time and not be doom-scrolling on your phone is great.
However, now you can earn an income. Okay, now we're talking about real impacts to you and your family and those for whom you're responsible. It's because if you're an hourly or salary employee, it may be different. But if you're an hourly employee in some business and the business requires the internet, and you're not working for three or four days, because the internet is down, you're not getting paid.
And for most people in today's economic situation, and in today's structure, the number of families that are living so close to the line, that losing four days of income in a month is actually gonna push them into the negative paycheck to paycheck as a reality for a vast majority, not the vast majority, but a good significant minority of people in Canada, the United States, and throughout our listening audience. Hence, loss of income matters. So losing the internet is just not funny jokes about not being able to TikTok doom-scroll. It's about real, about learning and income.
Now, it's also about connection to important services, right? There are some people who use the internet to make money. There's some of the people who use it, but there's some that use it to connect with family, right? There's some to use it to connect and chat with some very important people in their lives, and losing that connection is a big deal, because let's ask ourselves honestly, how many of you still have landlines in your home?
Some do, yeah, I get that, fair enough. But from the vast majority of people have disconnected, I disconnected my landline 11 years ago, right? I don't have a home phone. So when the cell network is down, like when I lose access to the cell network and both my primary and secondary systems, I just don't talk to people.
Which is fine, you know, again, it's like, oh, I got a couple of days off, and that's fine. But if I need to talk to people, if you have an alien relative, if you have somebody from whom you're responsible that you need to check in on a regular basis, not having the phone means you gotta check in on it in a way. The idea is that it's impactful, but the impact is not gonna be the same for you and I, right? Your exposure to independence on this sector of critical infrastructure is going to look different from mine, so the strategy you need to employ to mitigate that, prepare for, and then deal in a response framework for the loss of that critical infrastructure is going to look different.
That's why downloadable form filler PDFs that are not based upon that framework are gonna be bloody useless, but they're all over the internet. People are selling on their same download, this is your family preparedness plan. I'm like, yeah, sure, check a few boxes, no, no, it doesn't work that way. Now we've got a free family preparedness handout, three pager over at preparedness labs.ca, free download, you don't have to give me your email, I won't know you there, there's no secret trackers or anything like that, and it's just a start point of where you have to consider, and it talks about the ideas you need to consider, it doesn't tell you to do N2345, and then you're good to go.
No, because the world doesn't work like that, because your family looks different from mine, and as you can see, as a commentary across social media that is up about people being, if today happened and you were trying to fly somewhere, it's a bigger impact than if you're just sitting at home reading a book and doing a little bit of gardening on a Friday, right? So it's gonna have a varying degree of impact, and it's gonna have a varying degree of importance. So my point is that you have an individual exposure, and I'm highly recommending, as I've done in many other episodes, but today, especially, use this episode as leverage, use this episode as the catalyst, use this IT down as a rationale for you to pause, take a moment, and reflect across the 10 sectors of critical infrastructure, your exposure to and dependency on, that's my task for you. Your homework for the weekend is to go to, if you're in the US right down the 16 sectors, if you're Canada right 10, if you're anywhere else in our listening audience, and we are downloaded in 58 countries around the world, congratulations to all the people here at Inside Mike Newhead that make this podcast possible for all of you.
When you look at your home country, however you've got it organized, you just go to Canada and the US and use that as a framework, it'll give you the same type of information, and then you sit down and say, okay, how am I dependent on, and how am I exposed to this, and if you're really not sure how to organize that, just ask yourself that simple question, that question that we propose all the time. What does my world look like when I no longer have access to it, and the reason we use no longer have access to it, is it takes away the reason why it's down. We don't want you to have a tornado plan, a hurricane plan, and all these other flood plans, I think you could have 25 plans and bury yourself in preparedness, simply phrase it by the methodology that, what does my world look like when I no longer have access to the healthcare system, right? Health is one of the critical infrastructure elements.
That would include everything from a pharmacy to your primary physician, to the emergency room, to ambulances, okay? If those four things, or even one of those four things are down, what does your world look like? And for a lot of people might be, yeah, you know, a couple of days, no big deal, I don't have any coming doctors appointments, I'm pretty healthy, right? But what happens if you lose access?
Something occurs and you don't have 911 to call. What does your world look like? And that's what that question poses. And then because your family's gonna look different, it could be multi-generational, multi-location, because your age and a whole bunch of considerations about your family are different.
How you earn an income, your leisure activities. There are so many permutations and combinations of potential individuals and society, you reflect on what it looks like when that's gone down. I always recommend, and this is what I work on with clients is, let's look at the short term, 72 hours, right? It's famous in preparedness.
What does your world look like if something is now for 72 hours versus 14 days? That's a different reflection. And then you look at that from a personal perspective and then you look at that from a business perspective, right? A professional perspective, however you earn your income.
So you've got four answers for each of the 10 pieces of critical infrastructure, right? So now you've got a set of 40 questions you're asking yourself. And so now you're understanding, the answer to those 40 questions provides you things that are of concern to you, right? Out of that 40 responses, a couple of them are gonna bubble to the surface and make you go, hmm, I wonder, this is really impactful, I should probably do something about this, right?
Now you know where to begin. Now you know where to start and you're preparing a strategy. It's not complicated. I offer this free of charge.
It's in my books that I have out on Amazon. The links are at preparednesslabs.ca. If you wanna do that, it's coming out in our new module. We're adding to our signature course, Adopt a Prepared Life, which has a sale going on right now.
It is $30 off, so it's $99 Canadian and a lot less American. And that gives you lifetime access as we add modules to the video course, Adopt a Prepared Life. The first set of chapters that are out now are about those initial first 20% of preparedness that you need to do that talks about, you know, shelter and play strategy, evacuation strategies, power loss strategies, things like that, identifying your family's needs and how to prepare to deliver and support the six animalistic requirements of food, water, shelter, health, safety and security for you and those who you're responsible. So that leads you down a road of understanding how your exposure is correlated to your level of preparedness.
So if you have a very limited exposure to critical infrastructure, then you have a higher degree of preparedness. It's inversely related. Or if it's highly correlated, which means you have, like for example, I run this company that I run preparednesslabs incorporated is based upon the digital architecture and the delivery of digital products, right? And one to one services over Zoom and video conferencing.
That is an internet and cell network heavy dependency. So I have to have some fairly robust, significant strategies in place so that when Rogers goes down in Canada or tell us or Bell on the internet or the cell or both, I still have the ability to deliver uninterrupted my complete suite of services to my customers, right? If I can't do that, then I'm crashing potentially my business. So if you have a business, even if it's an auto shop, right?
Your point of sale system that your clients pay by tapping, inserting their card, whatever, that requires the internet. The internet goes down, how are you going to take credit card payments from individuals when you don't have a point of sale system? That's a big deal for an automotive. Not everybody carries cash to pay an automated bill.
If they don't have the cash and the point of sale system is down, they're not gonna be able to go to the bank and withdraw money because the bank won't be able to check the electronic records. They won't be able to use an ATM. So now how do you, how do you as an automotive business take payment when your point of sale is down? It's a great question.
There are fantastic ideas and some good strategies out there to have some type of backup system and a methodology to get your point of sale system back up fairly quickly, but if you don't think about it, in times of peace and calm, in blue sky planning, and you wait until the event occurs to try to navigate what you intend to do when you lose access to this element of critical infrastructure, you are going to be in the sea with the fishies, right? Everybody swimming in a pond. We've all seen it. So if you look around you and you have an IT fail, you have a bunch of people staring at their phones and asking each other what's going on and trying to figure out and you're standing there as an independent person in that group.
And what you're doing is you're executing your plan strategy that you had developed in times of peace and calm. You're switching over to an alternate provider and alternate system and in a very short order, you're back up and running. So you're back up and running and still carrying on and rocking an incredible life. Well, everybody around you is trying to figure out what's going on in the world, what's happening to whom and information that is necessary for them to try to figure out what to do next.
And you and your family are executing a well-rehearsed strategy and a well-rehearsed plan, right? That's the idea of preparedness, taking a head and doing it ahead. So today's IT Cloudware-based outage, it should be a really big wake up call for everybody listening to this podcast. And for people, generally out there in the world, this is not the first one.
Like again, I referenced Rogers Failure in Canada, but we could go off and list off probably 20 notable failures in IT systems due to non-hacking or no malfeasance involved, but just how interconnectedness and inter-coupled the systems are. Yet each time it happens, everybody seems to be at a loss for what to do and is running around pointing fingers. Now, on a bit of a rant, that's because we have a bit of victim mentality in a lot of our systems and society nowadays, where people will profess themselves to be victims of cyber failures. Now, cyber crime and identity theft is different.
That's not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to events like today when you have an exogenous shock that's beyond your control and influences how you do business. You have the opportunity to choose to employ a strategy of figuring out how to navigate it and get around it, or you can do what the majority of people do is you adopt a victim mentality, you throw your arms up in the air, you're being abused and oppressed by an external system that's beyond your control, and it's somebody else's responsibility to come help you. We see that infecting a lot of areas of our lives, but in the IT world, a lot of the times that's what you see.
And just go look at Twitter in the comments, right? There are people losing their crap about how poor, how do they let this happen, how could they do this to me? And it just screams a victimhood. It screams a victim ideology, whereas we suggest here at Inside Mike and Newhead and Prepared as Labs Incorporated, that you choose to adopt a prepared life.
And when you choose to adopt a prepared life, the first thing that you do is you look that incredible, handsome and beautiful person in the mirror, and you say, I accept responsibility for my outcomes, which means it's your fault, right? And Alex Hormosi had a great coat, and I put this up on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, a couple of days ago, and it was about the two most important words that lead people out of poverty is my fault, right? When people realize that nobody's coming to help, it is not somebody else's responsibility to take care of everything for you, that it is your responsibility. When you assume responsibility for your outcomes, it does not mean you're gonna control the internet, right?
No, no, when you take responsibility for your outcomes, it means I understand that if I'm going to be successful, if I'm going to successfully navigate disruptions as they may occur to me, that it is up to me to figure out a strategy, using time and effort and listening to inside my canoe head and following preparednesslab.ca and following all of this advice, I'm going to have a strategy so I will be successful or not, but whether I'm successful or not, I know it will be my fault, and I say that people all the time, I don't know whether what I'm doing in the world will be successful, I don't know whether I'll make $5,000 a month or $500,000 a month, but I know whatever happens, it's gonna be 100% my fault, good or bad. That means you accept person responsibility, that means with that, you now invest time and effort to build a preparedness strategy so that when events like today's IT and if you use Microsoft systems and your Microsoft systems go offline, four-three store, or you can't access your Microsoft cloud services and storage or your Google cloud, or in case it happens to iCloud, your iCloud, you have a very well understood and rehearsed strategy that you simply launch, you don't get into a pity, oh, poor is me, personal pity party about the loss of exposure, you get up, get off your arse as we say on the East Coast and you get after it, right? You're not a victim, you are responsible for your outcomes and so that's where these type of situations as I pop up just reinforce the idea of how little you actually control in this world and I'll end with this reference to Stoic philosophy that's grounding for a lot of what I do now in the last couple of years, it's reflecting on every event that occurs in the world falls within one of two categories, things that are within your control and things that are beyond your control. I have no control over the internet and the failure of a third party software fix.
What I do have control of is how I choose to respond to it and whether I choose to allocate time to create a plan for future possibilities for that. That's what I have control of. And if I have failed to plan and if I choose to be a victim and pound my feet like a toddler in the grocery store and complain about how I'm hurt and impacted, then it's my fault, right? It's absolutely my fault.
So hopefully today's a little conversation here about IT exposure dependency on critical infrastructure gives you a little bit of thought, has you sitting back and reflecting, okay, how I run my life is not wrong, it's not bad, I'm not doing things incorrectly, I'm chasing my dreams, right? That's an important part. None of you are doing anything wrong. What you may not be doing is having a strategy for when one of these sectors of critical infrastructure, as we would say in the army, takes a knee.
It takes a knee, what are you going to do next, all right? So listen to the strategy, follow us across all social media. I put up 25 pieces of social media content every day, seven days a week across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, right? It's all there, we got a website, triplewpreparednesslab.ca.
This podcast has its own website, triplewinsidemycanooed.ca, whereas if you like what you hear and you want to support the podcast, there is a button there where you can go to buy me a coffee and for $5 Canadian and a lot less American, you can buy me a delicious cup of black coffee. I appreciate you, thank you very much for taking the time to listen to us. Please have a great day, have a great weekend, and take the time to prepare. Stay safe.