“Despite the disruption, Jen Easterly said the outage was a ‘useful exercise’ to determine the resiliency of critical infrastructure organizations.”
Why this is important: CrowdStrike is a U.S. cybersecurity firm with 43 U.S. states and nearly 300 companies in the Fortune 500 as clients; not to mention clients in the U.K., India, France, Australia, and other nations. They offer a wide array of services, most of which is end point monitoring: the practice of continuous monitoring and management of devices that connect to a network, such as computers, mobile devices, and servers. On Friday, July 19, 2024, much of the world stopped when a CrowdStrike update containing a defect in a single content update for Windows hosts caused an out-of-bounds memory read. Out-of-bounds memory reads are a type of memory access error that can cause crashes, incorrect behavior, or security vulnerability. Thousands of flights were grounded. In some states, 911 lines were down. Hospital patient records systems were down. And, many industries across the globe felt the impact.
The most important aspect of this event was that this was not an attack. Save for the defect, the system update would have happened normally as all other updates have in the past and we never would have collectively been forced to realize our interconnected vulnerability. We can be sure that the enemies of the United States took notice. Top brass at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) noted the events as a big lesson. Hackers from China have already made clear that U.S. infrastructure, drinking, and wastewater systems are prime targets. The CrowdStrike incident proved how many nations, companies, and the comforts of modern society are vulnerable. The focus now is on building resilience in our networks and working to drive down the recovery time. Diversifying service providers or using local versus cloud-based software are a few simple considerations that could make a difference. Regardless, awareness must spread and actions must be taken to reinforce critical systems in a way that will prevent total collapse. --- Sophia L. Hines
