5 On Your Side: Protecting yourself from cyber attacks

A cybersecurity expert told WRAL the outage that took down 911 services, hospital systems and airlines is the largest IT outage he's ever seen.

5 On Your Side wanted to know if there is anything you can do to prepare or prevent something like this.

There are things that businesses and organizations do, or should be doing, that can prevent this type of massive outage.

On Friday, CrowdStrike, a company that provides software that detects cyber threats, pushed an update that affected anyone running CrowdStrike Falcon solution and Microsoft Windows. The update caused servers stopped functioning and therefore computers couldn't operate.

Brian Haugli, the CEO of cyber security company SideChannel, said there's two key preventative measures companies should do.

One is test updates on a small group.

"Most organizations generally have a small pool of systems which they release initial updates to before then releasing and authorizing them to the broader fleet or the rest of the organization," Haugli said. "So either most organizations aren't following the standard, which I find hard to believe, or CrowdStrike made a major update to a core component of their infrastructure."

Computers not using Crowdstrike for their cyber security weren't affected, so the other preventative action is to diversify.

"I think this proves that, yes, diversification, you know, would help that now, the downsides of diversification is now you have to manage multiple different systems, but you're increasing your odds on availability," Haugli said.

If you do have an incident, how do you respond? That means having the right support team - the right contacts at your vendors - being prepared for when things go wrong.