Many people had the same question as computers and electronic systems failed globally on Friday, slowing down airports, halting Social Security offices, and curtailing jail operations. How in the world could this be happening in 2024?
The core cause of the disruption was a software update from a single cybersecurity company, US-based CrowdStrike. This highlights the vulnerability of the global economy and its reliance on computer systems that are used by relatively few people on a daily basis.
Longtime cybersecurity expert Costin Raiu joked to CNN that “[m]ost people believe that when the world comes, it will be AI taking over some kind of nuclear power plant and shutting down electricity.” “However, in actuality, it’s more likely to be a small piece of code in an incorrect update, setting off a chain reaction in interconnected cloud systems.”
Updates to software play a vital role in society by protecting computers from hackers. However, the updating procedure itself must be done correctly to prevent manipulation. On Friday, a fundamental, and some would argue misguided, faith in that process was breached.
CrowdStrike is everywhere
CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software is used by many Fortune 500 organizations to identify and stop hacking threats. One of the most widely used software platforms worldwide, Microsoft Windows, caused computers to crash due to an error in the way a CrowdStrike code update interacted with Windows.
The multibillion-dollar company CrowdStrike has grown globally in the more than ten years that it has been in operation. Because of this, a lot more governments and enterprises are now protected from cyberthreats; however, experts warn that there are hazards associated with the dominance of a small number of companies in the anti-virus and threat-detection sector.
Munish Walther-Puri, the former head of cyber risk for the city of New York, told CNN that “we trust cybersecurity providers widely but without diversity; we’ve created fragility in our technology ecosystem.”
“Competitive success can lead to risk accumulation, which ultimately impacts both consumers and businesses,” stated Walther-Puri.
CNN has contacted CrowdStrike for comment.
How to prevent this from happening again
It’s also possible that the outage will prompt new discussions among US authorities and corporate leaders over the need for new policy measures to prevent repeat disasters, given the broad range of key infrastructure providers impacted.
When questioned about the IT outage on Friday, Anne Neuberger, a senior White House official in charge of technology and cybersecurity, discussed the “risks of consolidation” in the tech supply chain.
In response to a question regarding the IT outage, Neuberger stated at the Aspen Security Forum, “We need to really think about our digital resilience not just in the systems we run but in the globally connected security systems, the risks of consolidation, how we deal with that consolidation and how we ensure that if an incident does occur it can be contained and we can recover quickly.”
Although there was no malevolent actor involved in the chaotic situation that occurred on Friday, government officials everywhere will probably be speculating about what might have been.
A modified software update led to the 2020 US government hack, which was widely publicized and blamed on Russia by US officials. The hack included SolarWinds software. Although not nearly as destructive as the previous attack, a different purported Russian hack from 2017 is said to have cost the world economy billions of dollars due to the propagation of malicious malware.
The CrowdStrike incident, according to Tobias Feakin, a former ambassador for cybersecurity and critical technologies in the Australian foreign ministry, “demonstrates the serious damage that could be inflicted by a malicious adversary if they were so minded,” speaking with CNN.
Source: CNN
