James' World 2

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The global information technology outageon July 19, 2024, that paralyzed organizations ranging from airlines to hospitals and even the delivery of uniforms for the Olympic Games represents a growing concern for cybersecurity professionals, businesses, and governments.

The outage is emblematic of the way organizational networks, cloud computing services, and the internet are interdependent, and the vulnerabilities this creates. In this case, a faulty automatic update to the widely used Falcon cybersecurity software from CrowdStrike caused PCs running Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash. Unfortunately, many servers and PCs need to be fixed manually, and many of the affected organizations have thousands of them spread around the world.

For Microsoft, the problem was made worse because the company released an update to its Azure cloud computing platform at roughly the same time as the CrowdStrike update. Microsoft, CrowdStrike, and other companies like Amazon have issued technical work-arounds for customers willing to take matters into their own hands. But for the vast majority of global users, especially companies, this isn’t going to be a quick fix.

Modern technology incidents, whether cyberattacks or technical problems, continue to paralyze the world in new and interesting ways. Massive incidents like the CrowdStrike update fault not only create chaos in the business world but disrupt global society itself. The economic losses resulting from such incidents – lost productivity, recovery, disruption to business and individual activities – are likely to be extremely high.

As a former cybersecurity professional and current security researcher, I believe that the world may finally be realizing that modern information-based society is based on a very fragile foundation.

The bigger picture

Interestingly, on June 11, 2024, a post on CrowdStrike’s own blog seemed to predict this very situation– the global computing ecosystem compromised by one vendor’s faulty technology – though they probably didn’t expect that their product would be the cause.

Software supply chains have long been a serious cybersecurity concern and potential single point of failure. Companies like CrowdStrike, Microsoft, Apple, and others have direct, trusted access into organizations’ and individuals’ computers. As a result, people have to trust that the companies are not only secure themselves, but that the products and updates they push out are well-tested and robust before they’re applied to customers’ systems. The SolarWinds incident of 2019, which involved hacking the software supply chain, may well be considered a preview of today’s CrowdStrike incident.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said “this is not a security incident or cyberattack” and that “the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.” While perhaps true from CrowdStrike’s perspective – they were not hacked – it doesn’t mean the effects of this incident won’t create security problems for customers. It’s quite possible that in the short term, organizations may disable some of their internet security devices to try and get ahead of the problem, but in doing so they may have opened themselves up to criminals penetrating their networks.

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