John Lee, an IT manager at the University of Illinois’s Grainger College of Engineering, and his team responded admirably to last year’s CrowdStrike outage, strategically sending out help to get systems back online. Lee and his on-campus infrastructure and user services teams also got together shortly after the incident to figure out what they could do better the next time they face 2,500 blue screens of death.

In case you’ve been sleeping under a Mac for the last year, a faulty content update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity sensor on July 19, 2024, crashed millions of devices and impacted facilities that require high availability, including airports, banks, and healthcare facilities.

In Lee’s “after-action review,” he and fellow IT practitioners determined they needed to establish clear incident-management roles, as well as a “command chain” for sharing information across all divisions of the organization, not just the IT department.

“It took us some time to self-organize in the beginning, and we recognize that,” Lee said.

How the 2024 outage shook things up.—BH

Europe is facing many of the same cybersecurity challenges as the rest of the world, and its proximity to conflict in Ukraine and Southwest Asia is making things worse.

That’s according to a new CrowdStrike report on the region, which identifies the threats from cybercriminals and nation states. Attacks from different eCrime syndicates have increased and “big game hunters,” attackers who take on large organizations, often find worthy targets in wealthy Europe.

Checking the health bar. In a roundtable on the report in late October, CrowdStrike SVP of Counter Adversary Operations Adam Meyers told reporters that the data shows “there’s a healthy ecosystem for buying access to compromised organizations.” Gangs in Eastern Europe who have been focused on attacking North American targets—who tend to pay more—easily translate their language skills to the UK, and also target neighboring Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.

But wait, there’s more! (Spoiler: it’s political espionage.)—EH

AI continues to drive the job market, with postings reflecting the impact of the technology.

CompTIA Chief Research Officer Tim Herbert told IT Brew that AI’s effect on hiring shouldn’t be overstated. In a recent survey of 1,200 professionals in the IT space, the trade association found that the technology is being introduced throughout tech organizations—but it’s not always clear if it’s being implemented effectively.

“Companies are experimenting, they’re attempting to move from pilot project to full production, and they’re hitting snags along the way,” Herbert said. “That’s not uncommon; we have seen that with just about every digital transformation technology over the past 10, 20 years.”

What the numbers say.—EH

After conquering Go, AlphaGo’s legacy lives on in today’s AI revolution. DeepMind’s David Silver explains how lessons from a 3,000-year-old game are powering modern breakthroughs—and why collaboration, not competition, is the key to progress.