What happened with CrowdStrike?
A Deeper Look at CrowdStrike: The Indirect Effect of an Internet Outage on Airlines, Financial Systems, Banks and Financial Services
The largest airlines, TV broadcasters, banks, and other essential services all came to a standstill on Friday due to a large-scale internet outage. The Blue Screen of Death was linked to one software company, CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike plays an important role in helping companies find and prevent security breaches, billing itself as having the “fastest mean time” to detect threats. Since its launch in 2011, the Texas-based company has helped investigate major cyberattacks, such as the Sony Pictures hack in 2014, as well as the Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016. As of Thursday evening, CrowdStrike had an estimated value of $83 billion.
The update seems to have caused systems to be stuck in a boot loop by installing faulty software onto the core operating system. Systems are showing an error message that says, “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly,” while giving users the option to try troubleshooting methods or restart the PC. The airline in India has been using the old-fashioned way of doing things.
The Impact of CrowdStrike Updates on Network Interconnectedness, Security, and IoT Systems: An Insight from Lukasz Olejnik
“Our software is extremely interconnected and interdependent,” Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher, consultant, and author of the book Philosophy of Cybersecurity, tells The Verge. “But in general, there are plenty of single points of failure, especially when software monoculture exists at an organization.”
Although CrowdStrike has deployed a fix, getting things up and running won’t be a simple task. Olejnik tells The Verge that this issue could take “days to weeks” to resolve because IT administrators may have to have physical access to a device to get them working again. The size of the company’s IT team can have an affect on how fast that happens. “Some systems in certain specific circumstances may be unrecoverable, but I assume that the majority will be recovered,” Olejnik adds.
There are areas of greatest disruption that require multiple computer systems to communicate. He shows how critical the practice is of cleaning, sterilizing, and disinfecting medical devices. To ensure that best practices are followed and the risk of potentially lethal infections is minimized, this is monitored through digital tools across several computers.
It quickly became evident that this wasn’t an isolated incident. A cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike had made a routine update to its Falcon antivirus product, utilized by companies ranging from banks to airlines to hospitals. That update contained a bug, an error that caused all computers running the software on a Windows operating system to crash.
He says the impact is huge. “It affects all aspects of modern digital health systems. The CrowdStrike application upgrade can cause disruption in places like the operating room and emergency rooms, but the computers running the whole time did not take it.
