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00:00France's cyber agency said there is no evidence that this was a cyber attack.
00:04We're all linking this back to CrowdStrike.
00:07I want to speak to Fabrice Epelboin, instructor at Sciences Po University,
00:11as well as an entrepreneur.
00:13Hello to you, Fabrice. Thank you for speaking to Paris Direct this Friday.
00:16What was your first reaction when you saw the news about this global IT outage?
00:20Well, it's obviously a bug.
00:22It's a bug from CrowdStrike, and CrowdStrike is the leader in this kind of security solution.
00:27They have around 25% market share, so it's going to affect tons of companies,
00:33whether banks or airports and any kind of company.
00:36About a quarter of companies using Microsoft worldwide are going to be affected by this bug.
00:43Is it possible for you to just speculate about how much this sort of outage would cost on a global scale?
00:51Billions of dollars.
00:53I mean, when you stop an airport for only 24 hours, it represents a huge amount of money, lost money.
01:01And this is happening worldwide, so the total will be counted in billions of dollars, no doubt.
01:07And going back to what you said earlier, a bug at CrowdStrike, to be clear, would that be a technical bug
01:14or would it be a human error bug about issuing this sort of faulty update?
01:21It looks like a human error bug, nothing really bad, just a human error.
01:26It's not an attack. There's no Russian. There's no Chinese attack.
01:29Nothing like that so far, only a human error.
01:33And right now, with this outage, are computers and networks and systems more vulnerable to an IT cybersecurity attack then?
01:48Well, so far, they're not working, so they are safe in a way because they're not working.
01:53It's pretty easy to have them work again.
01:56It's just really long to do that, but you can boot your computer and hack the thing to have it working.
02:04But the security update that was supposed to be given last night by CrowdStrike are not here.
02:10So that creates a window of opportunity for cyber attacks until CrowdStrike fix the problem,
02:16which would take probably 24 to maybe 48 hours.
02:19It should be really quick, but this actually creates a window of opportunity for real cyber attack.
02:26And I'm guessing many people before this outage didn't know about CrowdStrike.
02:30Its shares have already plunged 20 percent in pre-market trading in New York.
02:35Should the company, will the company be held accountable in some way?
02:40That's a really good question.
02:41It depends on the contract signed between CrowdStrike and various companies.
02:46If they are responsible in a legal way and they need to give some money in some way to the company affected by this,
02:55they will definitely go bankrupt.
02:57But I'm guessing this has been anticipated in the legal contract.
03:04And Fabrice, just one more question.
03:08When we see a company like CrowdStrike based in Austin, Texas, being linked to the origin of this outage,
03:16is it inevitable that some company like CrowdStrike will have this much impact on the sort of global interconnectedness?
03:25Or is there a way to cloister off certain businesses to have less influence?
03:32I'm afraid it's quite inevitable, but it could be so much worse.
03:36I mean, we had this kind of problem five years ago with a company named SolarWind.
03:41And this time it wasn't a human error.
03:43It was a cyber attack from the Russian, and it enabled the Russian to enter multiple IT systems all around the world.
03:52This CrowdStrike bug is nothing compared to what happened five years ago with SolarWind.
03:58That was a major disaster.
04:00This is just a wake-up call, a wake-up call telling us that something needs to be done in terms of cybersecurity.
04:07Something needs to be done because Europe or India or China cannot rely on the United States for their security.
04:16They have to have some sort of sobriety.
04:18And CrowdStrike is the exact opposite of sobriety.