Blitz Bureau
AIRLINES, banks, hospitals and other risk-averse organisations around the world chose cybersecurity company CrowdStrike to protect their computer systems from hackers and data breaches.
Faulty update
But all it took was one faulty CrowdStrike software update to cause global disruptions last week grounding flights, knocking banks and media outlets offline, and disrupting hospitals, retailers and other services, said an AFP report. The trouble with the update issued by CrowdStrike and affecting computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system was not a hacking incident or cyberattack, according to CrowdStrike, which apologised.
It wasn’t an easy fix. It required “boots on the ground” to remediate, said Gartner analyst Eric Grenier. “The fix is working, it’s just a very manual process and there’s no magic key to unlock it,” Grenier said. Worrying about the fragility of a globally connected technology ecosystem is nothing new. It’s what drove fears in the 1990s of a technical glitch that could cause chaos at the turn of the millennium.
Y2K problem
“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time,” wrote Australian cybersecurity consultant Troy Hunt on the social platform X. Across the world last week, affected computers were showing the “blue screen of death” — a sign that something went wrong with Microsoft’s Windows operating system. But what’s different now is “that these companies are even more entrenched,” Falco said. “We like to think that we have a lot of players available. But at the end of the day, the biggest companies use all the same stuff.”
