Who is having fun with the crowdstrike issue?

Tom Welsh

Jul 19 in General discussion

Banking, Transportation, Payment Systems, Telecommunications et all....

A bit off topic for AI but will make a great case study in Cybersecurity/Operational Infrastructure design.

As you will be aware, a massive IT issue is affecting lots of companies.

Crowdstrike pushed out an update to their Endpoint protection software, which has 'bricked' PCs and servers.

From an operational viewpoint this is a massive issue. I have friends in multiple companies rebuilding lots of windows servers as they have been bricked. Bearing in mind that these are servers providing a service for online trading platforms, this is a big issue.

Next, we hit supply chain. Once these servers are rebuilt and the errant Crowdstrike files are no longer there, the trading platform still won't work completely, as withdrawals are failing. I guess that the payment provider's system ran on Windows, too.

I wonder what's next? Downdetector.com is pretty busy.

Incidents like these make us consider what is good and bad in systems design and implementation. One simple update to a single file can wreak havoc and cost multiple companies untold sums of money.

I am sure there will be a lot of document reading going on in legal departments worldwide to see if they can sue the company and also if their Cyber/Business insurance enables them to recover costs.

Have you been affected? Mac and Linux users have escaped this time, but the same kind of issue could bring a similar issue to your doorstep one day.

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