CrowdStrike Issue Causes Serious Problems for Businesses, Emergency Services, and Critical Infrastructure

July 18th, 2024 saw one of the most widespread and devastating outages in recent memory, as a global update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike brought about significant impacts to major infrastructures and societal needs. All this occurred even though only 1% of Windows operating systems experienced the issue.

Now that we have had time to reflect on the issue, let's see what happened to lead up to the event and what was done in response to it.

How the Bad Update Was Pushed

CrowdStrike Falcon is a cloud-based cybersecurity platform that secures endpoints and identities through the use of AI, automation, and threat intelligence. Automation is at the heart of the issue here.

These updates must pass through Windows' pipeline execution level in order for any of Microsoft's software instances to be updated. This is where the real pain starts to occur.

With Falcon, whenever a Windows device tried to access the files, Crowdstrike’s tools created efforts that caused the OS to crash.

As for automation’s role in this, the problem occurred due to a bug in CrowdStrike’s testing and validation process for its updates. In short, the testing failed, and the flawed update was automatically pushed to any computer using CrowdStrike that was powered on and receiving updates between midnight and 1:27 AM (when the flawed update was discovered and pulled) on July 19th. Consequently, some 8.5 million devices across the world had the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD). The fix was to delete the files causing the update.

CrowdStrike released a resource for IT teams to use as a reference when resolving this issue.

As Expected, Scammers Are Leaping at the Opportunity

Scammers are, of course, having a field day with this event. They have already built phishing campaigns claiming to help users fix the issue. Others are just wiping things out entirely and replacing data with blank files. They then announce their exploits to the world through social media. Your team needs to know the risks associated here and what you can do about them.

The Result: Serious Problems All Around the World

The consequences of this issue were widespread and problematic, from canceled flights to interrupted emergency services and medical facilities. Financial companies had their own fair share of issues to deal with, as well as trains and ground transportation. While this issue only impacted less than one percent of all Windows devices, it caused serious issues for any organizations and infrastructure that relied on it, as well as the companies and individuals utilizing critical services.

How would your business react to such a serious problem? If you were impacted, do you want it to happen again?

The consequences of a failure of this magnitude are considerable. You want to meet your clients’ expectations, and it’s hard to do that when your business doesn’t have its finger on the pulse of potential technology troubles like this. If you want an advantage in situations like this, call us at Washington Works. We’ll work with you to resolve any challengers that your technology faces.

Learn more by calling us at 301-571-5040.