It was half past midnight Eastern Time when Andrew Rosenberg, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor who works as chief information officer at Michigan Medicine, suddenly noticed that a substantial number of computers across the health care center had ceased to function. In the hospital’s parlance, it counted as a “catastrophic major incident.”
“We do some fairly sophisticated automatic monitoring of our core systems, and when those suddenly went offline, that triggered alerts,” says Rosenberg. “In a couple of our units, the majority of their computers all had the blue screen of death.”
It soon became clear that this was not an isolated incident. A cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike had made