CrowdStrike Outage!
What Happened Exactly?
By Norhan Gamal – Technical Content Creation Team
23/07/2024
For sure, you have recently heard about the CrowdStrike crisis, which caused various issues around the world, causing a stop in airplanes’ schedule, banking, and other fields, including health and retail. But have you wondered what exactly happened? Are you looking for a place that provides you with all the information about this crisis? Let us tell you about it.
What is CrowdStrike?
Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company founded in 2011 with the aim of safeguarding the world’s biggest companies and hardware from cyber threats and vulnerabilities. It specializes in endpoint security protection and tries to prevent malicious software or files from hitting corporate networks from devices that connect to them, such as phones and laptops.
Since it was first launched, the company has seemingly played a key role in helping firms investigate cyber-attacks. In 2016 Crowdstrike was called in by the US Democratic National Committee, the strategy arm of the Democrat Party, to investigate a breach into its computer network.
What Happened?
As you might have gathered, an issue with CrowdStrike cybersecurity software is causing a widespread global issue. Engineers at CrowdStrike were working on the issue, which affects its Falcon Sensor product. CrowdStrike calls Falcon “the CrowdStrike platform purpose-built to stop breaches via a unified set of cloud-delivered technologies that prevent all types of attacks—including malware and much more.”
The IT outage has affected airports, businesses, and broadcasters, according to the Sky News website. Planes have been grounded in the U.S., trains in the U.K. are impacted, as well as boarding scanners at Edinburgh airport in Scotland.
How to Fix It?
It’s not easy to say what to do next. While there is a workaround, it’s not scalable, as it would need to be applied manually, system by system. In a large company, this could take hours or more to get back up and running. It appears that the so-called “Blue Screen of Death” those computers are suffering means that each one needs to get “hands on keyboards treatment”.
That is, it appears to be not something that can be fixed with a central command from an IT administrator in a firm’s HQ. They will need to go and reboot each and every computer affected. If it is indeed a Crowdstrike issue that could be a monumental task. Crowdstrike reported having nearly 24,000 customers in its last earnings. Each customer is a large organization, so the number of individual end points could be enormous.
What was CrowdStrike’s Response?
George Kurtz – The head of CrowdStrike – hasn’t had a great couple of days. He wrote various online statements apologizing and offering some advice. “I want to sincerely apologize directly to all of you,” he wrote. “All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation.” But he also took the opportunity to warn users caught in the outage to check who they’re talking to online when being offered a solution. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you’re engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives. Our blog and technical support will continue to be the official channels for the latest updates.”
He elaborated on another statement that, “Crowdstrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of Crowdstrike customers.”
Tom Gerken. (2024, July 20). CrowdStrike boss writes blog apologising and warning users of ‘bad actors’.
How to Protect Your Business & Avoid Scams?
With many of the outages being revealed, you may be wondering what you need to do.
First, be aware of phishing attacks, where scammers try to trick people into handing over their financial details. These sorts of scams have been around for decades and being aware of them is important, but prevention is better than intervention.
Also think about the information you share online, because cyber criminals will grab all the information that they can get to make their scams more convincing, and the simplest thing you can do with the biggest impact is to review the privacy settings on your social media accounts.
Put in a Nutshell,
CrowdStrike said a significant number of the over 8.5 million devices affected from Friday’s botched software update are back online. The outage led to over 1,500 cancelled flights in the US and dozens more across the UK for the third day in a row. Hospitals, GPs, pharmacies, banks, supermarkets, and millions of businesses have also been impacted.
CrowdStrike said the outage was caused by a defect in an update to its “Falcon” cybersecurity defense software for Windows hosts. Over the weekend, Microsoft released a recovery tool to help repair Windows machines. However, experts warned that it could take weeks for global tech infrastructure to fully recover.