Hello all,
Today’s news is very recent as of writing this post. Crowdstrike, a company aimed to protect against threat actors, announced today that they were experiencing technical issues with their software, and based on some updates, users that had Crowdstrike installed were experiencing a blue screen error on their systems.
This is a very bad problem though because a blue screen means much more when you are running Windows under the hood on all your payment kiosks for, say, a restaurant. This not only means you can’t do business and make money, but you have to essentially sit there by the grace of CrowdStrike’s team to investigate the reason for the technical error. They have no current reasoning to believe this was a cyberattack.
Hundreds of companies are impacted, from Microsoft, Visa, Amazon, Chase, Starbucks, and much more. In a way, it makes me wonder how companies do not have their systems running on Linux, and rather on Windows — where an error like this on Linux would probably prevent CrowdStrike from running, but is much more compartmentalized about how it handles that error. With Windows, you have a blue screen error and you are unable to boot until you boot into safe mode and find a fix.
How to fix:
According to Matt Santill, Founder @ Cyber Security Services:
Lessons Learned
The moral of the story here is that, it might be smart to hedge your daily usage of certain companies. If you own 5 bank accounts, and 3 of them are impacted by an outage like this, you still have access to money in 2 of them. If you give any one company too much power, they will be able to serve you 99.9% of the time, but going down and fully relied on by the globe just speaks volumes about how fragile our systems can really be.
Resources
https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-windows-outage-crowdstrike-global-it-probems