A massive IT outage precipitated by a software update from cybersecurity software firm Crowdstrike is impacting Microsoft systems globally and a wide range of vertical industries including transportation/airlines, financial services, and more. This special report features cybersecurity expert and CISO Chris Hughes, his initial analysis and recommendations, and also provides context for a Microsoft Azure outage that occurred in close proximity.
Highlights
01:17 — Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity platform widely used by Microsoft customers, rolled out an update to its Falcon platform, which is used for endpoint detection and response of malicious activity. It wasn’t a malicious attack on Crowdstrike; it was a software defect that caused the outage. It’s impacting critical organizations around the world: highly regulated organizations, financial institutions, national governments, airlines, medical facilities and more.
01:55 — Crowdstrike has provided guidance about how to remediate, but it requires manual intervention. As one of the largest cybersecurity software vendors in the world, Crowdstrike has an outsized presence, and this is causing system impact across the ecosystem. If a company isn’t a large enterprise environment with a dedicated IT and security team, it may not have the resources, bandwidth, and expertise to go about resolving the issue.
03:03 — It’s one thing to have technical controls in place but there’s something to be said for policies, processes, business continuity, disaster recovery, and incident response. It’s another thing to have actually practiced them and gone through exercises for situations like this.
05:08 — Hughes is advising customers — especially those that don’t have in-house resources to address the issue — that they may need to engage external help. They need to be closely watching the guidance put out by Microsoft and Crowdstrike on how to go about remediating the issue.
05:58 — The outage is causing revenue loss and disruption in critical services. It will be interesting to see how it plays out: How do we recover? What are the lessons learned? Will there be financial or regulatory issues for Crowdstrike in terms of how they’ve impacted organizations? Some people are calling this the largest IT outage ever; we’ll have to see how the metrics and figures evolve.
07:06 — On the Microsoft Azure outage, the two situations, it seems, were not connected. It was about a five-hour outage that’s been fixed, but some customers are seeing longer timelines for certain services to come back online. The timing is very odd, unfortunately.
08:40 — Software defects and disruptions are going to happen. This is where organizations really need to have codified disaster recovery/resiliency plans and incident response plans, in place. Not just have them documented but actually go through scenarios.
CIO Perspective: Crowdstrike/Microsoft Outage Ripples Through Software Supply Chain
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