CrowdStrike's Adam Meyers Addresses Congress on July's IT Catastrophe

CrowdStrike's Upcoming Testimony

A senior CrowdStrike executive will testify before the House Homeland Security Committee next month about the IT outage that grounded planes and workplaces to a halt globally on July 19th.

Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s senior vice president of counter adversary operations, has agreed to appear before the panel on September 24th at 2PM ET, as announced by the committee.

Significance of the Testimony

• Committee leaders had previously called on CEO George Kurtz to testify, but he is not currently listed as a witness.
• Inviting Meyers underscores the need for insight into the incident and how to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

Committee Chair Mark Green (R-TN) expressed hope for Kurtz’s attendance but emphasized that understanding the details of this outage is paramount. He stated, “Americans deserve to know how this incident happened and the mitigation measures CrowdStrike is implementing to prevent future outages across sectors.”

Call for Increased Cyber Hygiene

Green indicated that a flawed software update impacted 8.5 million Windows machines and exemplified the urgency behind promoting cyber hygiene and resilience amid increasing threats. The growing reliance on interconnected IT systems elevates the risk landscape.

Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), chairman of the subcommittee on Cybersecurity, stressed that this hearing represents an important opportunity to learn more about the steps CrowdStrike has undertaken following the outage to ensure such an event does not repeat.

Although the outage was not a result of a cyberattack, Garbarino remarked that adversaries might have observed this event and learned how a faulty software update could trigger cascading effects on critical infrastructure.