As for CrowdStrike, US Congress has called on CEO Kurtz to testify at a hearing about the tech outage. According to the New York Times, Kurtz was sent a letter by Representative Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and Representative Andrew Garbarino (R-NY).
Americans “deserve to know in detail how this incident happened and the mitigation steps CrowdStrike is taking,” they wrote in their letter to Kurtz, who was involved in a similar situation when, as CTO of McAfee, the company pushed out a faulty anti-virus update that impacted thousands of customers, triggering BSODs and creating the effect of a denial-of-service attack.
Financial impacts of the outage have yet to be estimated, but Derek Kilmer, a professional liability broker at Burns & Wilcox, said he expects insured losses of up to $1 billion or “much higher,” according to The Financial Times. Insurer Parametrix pegs that number at $5.4 billion lost, just for US Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft, Reuters reported.
Based on Microsoft’s initial estimate of 8.5 million Windows devices impacted, research firm J. Gold Associates has projected the IT remediation costs at $701 million, based on 12.75 million resource-hours necessary from internal technical support teams to repair the machines. That coupled with the fact that, according to Parametrix, “loss covered under cyber insurance policies is likely to be no more than 10% to 20%, due to many companies’ large risk retentions,” the financial hit from CrowdStrike is likely to be enormous.