A faulty update from a cybersecurity company caused a domino effect of problems for businesses worldwide last Friday 19th July 2024. This glitch impacted critical industries like banking, healthcare, and airlines. Banks and hospitals couldn’t provide their usual services, and television stations went off the air. Air travel was significantly disrupted with grounded planes and delayed flights.
CrowdStrike, a Texas-based company that offers cybersecurity software. This software is designed to help businesses identify and prevent hacking attempts. Many of the world’s most prestigious corporations, including major banks, healthcare providers, and energy companies, rely on CrowdStrike’s security solutions.
Now, let’s delve deeper into what exactly happened.
CrowdStrike tackles cybersecurity with a unique approach. Instead of guarding central server systems, they use the cloud to deliver protection directly to individual devices connected to the internet. This is known as “endpoint security.”
In contrast, many other cybersecurity firms focus on securing the back-end servers where data is stored.
This distinction is crucial because CrowdStrike’s software, Falcon, is installed on every machine within a client organization, according to Nick France, CTO at IT security firm Sectigo.
Here’s the crux of the issue: When a faulty update gets deployed to Falcon, it can cause problems across all these devices simultaneously. This can lead to machines rebooting unexpectedly and users being locked out of their computers, causing widespread disruptions.
Friday’s incident involved a problematic update that triggered the dreaded “blue screen of death” on many user machines. This blue screen is a common sign of a PC malfunction and can occur due to various reasons, like overheating. However, in this case, the culprit was the faulty CrowdStrike update for their Falcon endpoint security platform.
Thankfully, CrowdStrike reacted quickly and initiated a global rollback of the update
