The massive outage, which affected about 8.5 million Microsoft Windows PCs worldwide, may take days to weeks to recover from, experts estimate, even though it only affected 1% of systems in use. Industrial plants, hospitals, airports and media outlets were affected.
Image source: CrowdStrike
As noted Financial Timesa major IT security software vendor CrowdStrike blamed an update to its Falcon application, which caused a massive outage on Windows computers around the world. Server systems on the platform were also affected. CrowdStrike’s reputation was severely damaged by the situation, as many customers relied on the software as a first line of defense against cyberattacks.
According to Gartner’s Neil MacDonald, the first widely deployed security software agent designed to protect PCs actually crashed them. The only effective way to fix the CrowdStrike update problem was reportedly to reboot the computer and manually delete the ill-fated update files. In each case, the administrator would need physical access to the affected computer to fix the situation. Given the fairly extensive infrastructure of many companies, it could take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to fix the crash, the experts explain.
In situations like these, they say, administrators tend to focus on executive computers and server systems first, and may reach ordinary users last. Texas-based CrowdStrike served more than 29,000 corporate clients as of the end of last year, covering more than half of the Fortune 500 companies. The outage yesterday highlights how concentrated the risks are in the information security space. Gartner estimates that CrowdStrike is second only to Microsoft in terms of market reach, and has largely driven its market share so far thanks to the resonance of several major cyberattacks on a competitor.
On Friday, CrowdStrike representatives emphasized that the failure was not a cyberattack, and the company’s clients remain fully protected. However, third-party experts warn that attackers will take advantage of this situation to try to penetrate the information networks of CrowdStrike clients under the guise of software solutions that can eliminate the problem. Several fake sites with CrowdStrike in their names were created last week, literally within hours of the failure’s spread. According to analysts, the appearance of such an error in CrowdStrike software was caused by banal haste and neglect of code testing by developers.
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