O global cyber blackout which impacted the operating systems of companies and services in several countries, including airlines, banks, hospitals and media channels, reveals the risks of accessing data stored in the cloud. This is the opinion of professor and researcher Sergio Amadeu, from the Federal University of ABC Paulista (UFABC), sociologist and doctor in political science, and specialist in digital networks.
A failure in the content update related to CrowdStrike Falcon Security Sensorwhich is used to detect possible hacker attacks and is used by companies such as Microsoft, owner of Windows – widely used in computers – was the cause of the outage, which caused chaos in airports in North America and Europe.
O Brazil was also hitwith failures in banking applications and hospital systems, but on a much smaller scale than on other continents.
“Technological systems [em geral] have flaws, that is undeniable. But what this case draws the most attention is that the flaw occurred in Microsoft’s cloud service, especially for those who use solutions and systems that are hosted in a datacenter and that you access your data and system remotely. Cloud systems are quite agile, often cheaper, but they bring this problem and this warns us that there may be much more serious problems in the future”, said Amadeu, in an interview with the news program Reporter Brazilfrom the TV Brazilthis Friday.
Cloud storage allows access to data and files over the internet from a provider that stores, manages and maintains servers in data centers that store this information. According to Sergio Amadeu, these services are currently concentrated in the hands of a few large companies and this highlights the need to protect sensitive systems in the country.
“A failure in some machines that are within the cloud provider, Microsoft’s data centers in the United States, concentrates so much data, so many systems from various companies around the world, that it has generated a global economic problem, so much so that we are calling it a blackout. The concentration of data, of economic power that these digital oligopolies have acquired, is very large. So, Brazil needs to think about this very carefully. If, for example, important sensitive systems, whether for governments, for the financial system, for educational institutions, it is advantageous to have these data and systems hosted remotely,” he noted.
For the researcher, this problem could happen with servers that host data within their own company or in their own country, but this Friday’s cyber blackout shows the serious risks of remote access to systems and data and the need to discuss digital sovereignty.
“Imagine a hospital that has its entire database hosted on a cloud provider, and often this data is not even in Brazil. This poses a problem of digital sovereignty for us,” he highlighted.
