On July 19, much of the online world shut down. Airline flights were grounded resulting in long lines at airports in the U.S., Europe and Asia; banks in South Africa and New Zealand reported outages that impacted taking and making payments; media outlets in Australia were unable to broadcast for several hours; hospitals were unable to access their appointment systems resulting in delays and even cancellations for critical care. Some areas in the U.S. had issues with their 911 systems as a result – even some of the giant electronic billboards in New York City went dark.
In the end, it was nothing more than a faulty software update from the cyber company CrowdStrike – not a massive cyber attack. According to CrowdStrike itself, they went to push out an update for their cyber security tool “Falcon” to their customers worldwide that rely on CrowdStrike to provide cyber security for their Windows computer systems. That update ended up being faulty and one that shut down all Windows systems running CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software. Mac and Linux operating systems were not affected – just Windows.
Exposing a Vulnerability
What the faulty update did bring into focus is that because there are only very few companies that provide this kind of software protection, a disruption such as this underscores our online vulnerability if they make a small mistake such as this one. It pointed out one of the downsides of the old adage cautioning against “having all your eggs in one basket”.
As Craig Shue, professor and computer science department head at Worcester Polytechnic Institute pointed out, “It is an ‘all our eggs are in one basket’ situation. Let’s make sure our ‘basket’ is high quality. The software provider tries to identify threats and respond to them quickly. But at the same time, if anything goes wrong and the basket fails, we have a lot of broken eggs.”
With this one, we had broken eggs all over the world.
While CrowdStrike and Microsoft are working on a fix to the problem, CrowdStrike’s President and CEO George Kurtz noted some customers may need a “manual fix” to get their systems back online.
It is also important to note that affected companies may get offers from “companies” outside of CrowdStrike and Microsoft to help them get back online. While some of these companies are legitimate, it can be an open door for hackers to get access to a company’s computer systems. If you choose an outside service, be sure you know who you are dealing with.
