oh“Epic IT crashThe “terror attack” that temporarily brought the West to a halt was the result of human error, not a Russian cyber attack. SolarWinds Hacked A similar incident occurred in 2020.
Last week’s outage was caused by an update that CrowdStrike, a major U.S. cybersecurity firm, pushed out to its corporate customers early Friday morning that conflicted with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, rendering devices inoperable — an expected outcome, given that nearly every large organization in the world uses Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Luckily, the problem was easy to fix, but it was tedious, so people would think of it as a temporary problem, not a dry run for something. It’s much worseAfter all, if a single mistake from one tech company can cause this much disruption, imagine what a more determined adversary could do. Just as the pandemic has forced us to confront the limitations of global supply chains that were built for efficiency, not resilience, CrowdStrike’s mistake should serve as a catalyst for a reevaluation of our networked world.
One question to consider is the societal risk of industrial consolidation in the technology industry. CrowdStrike is one of the largest companies in the cybersecurity market. Microsoft dominates the business computing market. All large organizations run Windows, as do most small and medium-sized businesses. As governments, government agencies, and the National Cyber Security Center pressure companies to improve their cybersecurity, leading them to sign up for tools such as CrowdStrike’s Falcon, the likelihood of a disaster like the one we witnessed last week occurring increases.
Because most companies run on Microsoft Windows, corporate computing is essentially monocultural. While this may be good for efficiency, standardization, training, etc., it’s bad for resiliency when something goes wrong.
Industry consolidation also highlights the “attack surface” that hackers are looking for. When a few big cybersecurity companies supply millions of enterprise desktop PCs and regularly update them, the supply chain becomes an attractive area to cause large-scale disruption. This was vividly illustrated by the SolarWinds attack, which affected key US government departments (Homeland Security, State, Commerce, and Treasury) as well as companies like FireEye, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, and Deloitte.
There are lessons to be learned from this debacle. Clearly, regular automatic updates for security software are extremely beneficial, but In stages We roll out each update so that issues surface before they become severe.
But what the CrowdStrike error revealed more than anything is just how vulnerable our networked world has become.
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We have become totally dependent on a complex web of technology that most of us do not understand, spawned by industries that are unconcerned with the consequences of their own creations. We live in a new world, but it is certainly not a brave one.
