Last month, as you probably heard, airports were in chaos after numerous flights were abruptly cancelled, delayed, and/or rescheduled. This chaos occurred after a bad software update was sent out through Crowdstrike, a program used by many popular airlines such as Delta, Unites, and American, that accidentally caused a widespread outage. These airlines were forced to cancel numerous flights across the world due to the outage.
So, what is Crowdstrike and why is it so important? Crowdstrike is a popular cloud-based cybersecurity company that offers software with a wide variety of cybersecurity services like threat detection and response services. The company is a global leader in cybersecurity and is widely used by major companies such as Goldman Sachs, Rackspace, Sega, and Shutterstock. During the outage last month, many people heard about the flights that were cancelled, but many didn’t hear that many other industries were also affected. Medical procedures were delayed, trains didn’t run, broadcasters went off air, and more all because they used Crowdstrike.
Since Crowdstrike’s software has broad privileges across your entire computer system, if/when something goes wrong with the program, the ripple effect can be brutal. On the morning of Friday, July 19, the company sent out a sensor configuration update to their Falcon program that revealed this ripple effect, causing one of the largest IT outages in history. Apparently, the faulty update did not interact well with Windows systems, meaning that every company using Crowdstrike’s Falcon program on Windows systems was affected.
According to a statement made by Crowdstrike about the incident, the company routinely tests their software updates before releasing them to their customers. However, On July 19, a bug in their own system ended up allowing the faulty software update to be pushed out despite containing problematic content data. Although the company rolled back the update just an hour after releasing it, millions of devices had already automatically downloaded the update. Customers across the globe were met with blue screens that could only be fixed via individual manual intervention to delete the bad file.
Although the company has pledged to prevent another incident like this from happening again, the damage from this incident has already been done. It is estimated that the outage cost Fortune 500 companies as much as $5.4 billion in revenues and gross profit, and several companies are still struggling to recover. Just on the day of the update, it is estimated that about 4,400 flights were cancelled worldwide.
The good news is, Crowdstrike is not the only option when it comes to cybersecurity protection. Here at Blue Oak, we’ve chosen Sophos to manage cybersecurity. Any company using Sophos for protection, or any other cybersecurity program for that matter, were unaffected by the outage. One reason that we have chosen Sophos as our cybersecurity provider is that they have strict internal testing procedures and, unlike Crowdstrike, gradually push out updates to small groups of customers at a time to ensure minimal damage in the event of an error. Although no tech company is immune to errors, this method helps reduce the likelihood of catastrophes like the Crowdstrike outage. After the incident, Sophos extended their support and well-wishes to the company and all those who were affected by the outage.
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