The CrowdStrike July 19th Outage: An Impact of a Big-Data Security Platform on an Indian Airlines Airlines System in India
The July 19th outage is tied to CrowdStrike’s flagship Falcon platform, a cloud-based solution that combines multiple security solutions into a single hub, including antivirus capabilities, endpoint protection, threat detection, and real-time monitoring to prevent unauthorized access to a company’s system.
CrowdStrike says that it is having the “fastest mean time” to detect threats in order to assist companies in finding and preventing security breeches. Since its launch in 2011, the Texas-based company has helped investigate major cyberattacks, such as the Sony Pictures hack in 2014, as well as the Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016. CrowdStrike was valued at up to $83 billion as of Thursday evening.
The update seems to have put faulty software on the core Windows operating system, which causes systems to get stuck in a boot loop. Users are given the option to restart their PC if they get an error message saying that Windows didn’t load correctly. This airline in India has been using the old-fashioned way of doing things.
“Our software is extremely interconnected and interdependent,” Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher, consultant, and author of the book Philosophy of Cybersecurity, tells The Verge. There are a lot of single points of failure, especially when software monoculture exists at an organization.
What is going on in CrowdStrike? How healthcare administrators were affected by a major IT outage in the past, and what they were willing to do
CrowdStrike has deployed a fix, but getting things up and running won’t be easy. Olejnik says that it could take days to weeks to get the issue fixed because administrators may have to have physical access to the device. How fast that happens depends on the size and resources of a company’s IT team. Olejnik states that some systems may be unrecoverable, but he thinks that the majority will be recovered.
Around the globe, doctors, nurses and hospital administrators were going into panic mode as they raced to manage the consequences of the largest IT outage in history. Mass General Brigham, one of America’s biggest healthcare systems, cancelled all non-urgent surgeries, procedures, and medical visits. In the UK, Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust declared a critical incident affecting the systems used to deliver radiotherapy treatments. Hospitals in Canada, Germany, and Israel announced issues with their digital services, while the 911 emergency service in some US states was reported to be down. A WIRED reporter found both Baylor hospital network, one of the largest non-profit healthcare systems in the country, and Quest Diagnostics unable to process routine bloodwork. Donna Rossi stated that due to the lack of working internet, officers had to be dispatched manually.
It was apparent that this wasn’t an isolated incident. CrowdStrike makes a regular update to itsFalcon security product, used by companies such as banks and hospitals. That update contained a bug, an error that caused all computers running the software on a Windows operating system to crash.
He says that the impact is massive. It affects all aspects of modern digital health systems. Luckily in units where the computers are running the whole time, like the ICUs and emergency departments, the computers didn’t take the CrowdStrike application upgrade, whereas in areas of healthcare which are more episodic like operating rooms, the disruption is much greater.”
