The CrowdStrike incident in 2024 hit the UK like a hurricane. As it swept across the country, it ground flights to a standstill, forced hospitals to cancel operations, and brought down the computer systems and websites of hundreds of businesses.
Since the early 1970s, it has been possible to predict the damage likely to be caused by hurricanes using a five-point wind scale.
Category one hurricanes may damage roofs or break branches on trees, and at the other end of the scale, a category five hurricane could leave areas uninhabitable for months.
There’s no such way to categorise the destructive impact of cyber events like the CrowdStrike update, which brought down Windows computers worldwide in July 2024 – but that is set to change, as an initiative gets underway this year to assess the damage caused by major cyber attacks on a five-point scale.
The Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC), the first organisation of its type, has been set up by the insurance industry as an arms-length organisation to assess the impact of serious cyber attacks that have systemic implications for the UK’s infrastructure and services. It aims to make it easier for businesses to buy cyber insurance…
