Behind a massive IT failure that grounded flights, upended markets and disrupted corporations around the world is one cybersecurity company: CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. Known as a dominant supplier of software that protects businesses from ransomware attacks, CrowdStrike was thrust into the spotlight on 19 July as it struggled to fix a faulty patch that led to cascading, system-wide failures, paralyzing the operations of clients ranging from banks to global retail giants to health-care systems.
Wall Street’s reaction to CrowdStrike’s monumental gaffe was swift: Its shares tanked as much as 15% in New York trading on 19 July, wiping out almost $8 billion of its market value. The company is still worth nearly $80 billion. “There’s a widespread crisis of confidence among security and IT teams within the Microsoft security customer base,” he said.[1]
The type of software CrowdStrike supplies is separate and distinct from older, more limited types of security software. Traditional antivirus software was useful in the early days of computing and the internet for their ability to hunt for signs of known malware, but it has fallen out of favor as attacks have become more sophisticated. Now, products known as “endpoint detection and response” software that CrowdStrike develops do far more, continually scanning machines for any signs of suspicious activities and automating a response. But to do this, these programs have to be given access to inspect the very core of the computers’ operating systems for security defects. This access gives them the ability to disrupt the very systems they are trying to protect. And it is how Microsoft’s Windows systems came into play in Friday’s outage.
Representatives of Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike confirmed online reports that a glitchy update was responsible for disabling potentially millions of corporate and government Windows computers around the world and causing the dreaded “blue screen of death.” The company pegged the incident to “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” in a statement on the 19th and said the outage wasn’t down to a cyberattack or security breach. Anyone using a Mac or Linux machine isn’t impacted, the company said, adding that “a fix has been deployed.” To add to the confusion, an apparently separate incident involving Microsoft’s Azure cloud services also caused disruption on Friday. In a status update, Microsoft said it had fixed the underlying issue but that users would continue to experience “residual impact.”
While cybersecurity professionals say CrowdStrike’s technology is a strong way to defend against ransomware, its cost, which in some cases can be more than $50 per machine, means that most organizations don’t install it on all of their computers. What that means, however, is that the computers that have the software installed on them are among the most important to protect, and if they go down, key services can fall with them. Now that CrowdStrike’s fix is out, any Windows desktop or laptop machine with the CrowdStrike product affected by the initial flawed update will need to be updated.
How laborious that process is will depend on whether CrowdStrike can roll out the fix automatically, or whether every machine will need to be manually rebooted. In an interview with CNBC on the 19th, CrowdStrike’s Chief Executive Officer George Kurtz said the company was looking for ways to automate the steps involved, suggesting at least some customers are stuck with manual fixes for now. The company also has addressed the software update at the root of the issue, Kurtz said. “It was a content bug, or update, that we sent out and we’ve identified, and that we’ve rolled back,” Kurtz said in an interview with CNBC on Friday. He apologized to affected customers, and said some systems would take a few hours to come back online while others would take longer.
That means affected entities - from banks to bourses to shipping ports, might take days to fully come back online, according to Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey. “To use the laptops, they’ll have to manually intervene: that is a big job,” Woodward said in an earlier interview with Bloomberg News. There’s also the question of how the bad rollout happened to begin with.
“CrowdStrike is meant to keep these machines safe,” Woodward said. “This is the sort of thing ransomware would do, but imagine ransomware simultaneously hitting the biggest organizations in the world, container ports in the Baltics, hospitals, railway stations, they’ve all been hit at once because of this one little file.” CrowdStrike’s customer base comprises large organizations that have a large number of remote machines to manage, he said. “The economic impact is going to be huge.”
This article is shared at no charge for educational and informational purposes only.
Red Sky Alliance is a Cyber Threat Analysis and Intelligence Service organization. We provide indicators of compromise information via a notification service (RedXray) or an analysis service (CTAC). For questions, comments or assistance, please contact the office directly at 1-844-492-7225, or feedback@redskyalliance.com
Weekly Cyber Intelligence Briefings:
- Reporting: https://www.redskyalliance.org/
- Website: https://www.redskyalliance.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/64265941
Weekly Cyber Intelligence Briefings:
REDSHORTS - Weekly Cyber Intelligence Briefings
https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/5378972949933166424
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/global-it-collapse-puts-cyber-firm-crowdstrike-in-spotlight/ar-BB1qh4cf/
Comments