{"id":72114,"date":"2024-07-20T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2024-07-20T07:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/guid_108008835"},"modified":"2024-07-20T07:00:12","modified_gmt":"2024-07-20T07:00:12","slug":"how-a-software-update-from-cyber-firm-crowdstrike-caused-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-it-blackouts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/how-a-software-update-from-cyber-firm-crowdstrike-caused-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-it-blackouts\/","title":{"rendered":"How a software update from cyber firm CrowdStrike caused one of the world\u2019s biggest IT blackouts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <span class=\"HighlightShare-hidden\" style=\"top:0;left:0\"><\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"RelatedQuotes-relatedQuotes\" id=\"RegularArticle-RelatedQuotes\">\n<div class=\"RelatedQuotes-quotesContainer\">\n<div class=\"RelatedQuotes-titleAndTime undefined\">\n<p class=\"RelatedQuotes-text\">In this article<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<ul class=\"RelatedQuotes-list\">\n<li class=\"QuoteItem-item\" aria-label=\"Quote for null\"><span class=\"waslinkname\"><span class=\"QuoteItem-symbol\">CRWD<\/span><\/span><span class=\"AddToWatchlistButton-watchlistContainer\" id=\"RegularArticle-WatchlistDropdown\" data-analytics-id=\"RegularArticle-WatchlistDropdown\"><button class=\"AddToWatchlistButton-watchlistButton\" aria-label=\"Add To Watchlist\" data-testid=\"dropdown-btn\"><span class=\"AddToWatchlistButton-addWatchListFromTag\"><\/span><\/button><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"RelatedQuotes-cfaButtonContainer\"><button id=\"ArticlePageTickerCreateAccountButton\" class=\"CreateFreeAccountButton-buttonContainer\"><span class=\"CreateFreeAccountButton-buttonText\"><span>Follow your favorite stocks<\/span><span class=\"CreateFreeAccountButton-buttonTextBold\">CREATE FREE ACCOUNT<\/span><\/span><\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"InlineImage-imageEmbed\" id=\"ArticleBody-InlineImage-105963167\" data-test=\"InlineImage\">\n<div class=\"InlineImage-wrapper\">\n<div class=\"InlineImage-imagePlaceholder\" style=\"padding-bottom:55.55555555555556%\">\n<div style=\"height:100%\" class=\"lazyload-placeholder\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"InlineImage-imageEmbedCaption\">George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike Inc., speaks during the Montgomery Summit in Santa Monica, California.<\/div>\n<div class=\"InlineImage-imageEmbedCredit\">Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"group\">\n<p>A fault with an update issued by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike led to a cascade effect among global IT systems Friday, with industries ranging from banking to airlines facing outages.<\/p>\n<p>Banks and health-care providers saw their services disrupted and TV broadcasters went offline as businesses worldwide grappled with the ongoing outage. Air travel has been hit hard, too, with <span class=\"waslinkname\">planes grounded<\/span> and services delayed.<\/p>\n<div style=\"height:100%\" class=\"lazyload-placeholder\"><\/div>\n<p>At the heart of the issue is Texas-based cybersecurity vendor <span class=\"QuoteInBody-quoteNameContainer\" data-test=\"QuoteInBody\" id=\"RegularArticle-QuoteInBody-2\"><span class=\"waslinkname\">CrowdStrike<\/span><span class=\"QuoteInBody-inlineButton\"><span class=\"AddToWatchlistButton-watchlistContainer\" id=\"-WatchlistDropdown\" data-analytics-id=\"-WatchlistDropdown\"><button class=\"AddToWatchlistButton-watchlistButton\" aria-label=\"Add To Watchlist\" data-testid=\"dropdown-btn\"><span class=\"AddToWatchlistButton-addWatchListFromTag\"><\/span><\/button><\/span><\/span><\/span>. On Friday, the cybersecurity firm <span class=\"waslinkname\">experienced a major disruption<\/span> following an issue with a software update.<\/p>\n<p>So what happened, exactly? CNBC takes a look.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h2 class=\"ArticleBody-subtitle\">What is CrowdStrike and what does it do?<\/h2>\n<div class=\"group\">\n<p>CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity vendor that develops software to help companies detect and block hacks. It is used by many of the world&#8217;s Fortune 500 companies, including major global banks, health-care and energy companies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div role=\"region\" aria-labelledby=\"Placeholder-ArticleBody-Video-108008872\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"group\">\n<p>CrowdStrike is what&#8217;s known as an &#8220;endpoint security&#8221; firm as it uses cloud technology to apply cyber protections to devices that are connected to the internet.<\/p>\n<p>This differs from alternative approaches used by other cyber firms, which involve applying protection directly to back-end server systems.<\/p>\n<div style=\"height:100%\" class=\"lazyload-placeholder\"><\/div>\n<p>&#8220;Many companies use [CrowdStrike software] and install it on all of their machines across their organization,&#8221; Nick France, chief technology officer at IT security firm Sectigo, told CNBC&#8217;s &#8220;<span class=\"waslinkname\">Squawk Box Europe<\/span>&#8221; on Friday.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;So when an update happens that maybe has problems with it, it causes this problem where the machines reboot, and people can&#8217;t get back into their computers.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h2 class=\"ArticleBody-subtitle\">What happened on Friday?<\/h2>\n<div class=\"group\">\n<p>On Friday, people around the world began encountering an error screen known as the &#8220;blue screen of death.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This issue \u2014 a common problem among PCs, for example if a machine overheats \u2014 was the result of an update from CrowdStrike&nbsp;concerning its Falcon product.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Falcon is a platform developed by the company that&#8217;s designed to stop cyber breaches using cloud technology \u2014 it is at the heart of the firm&#8217;s focus on endpoints. CrowdStrike said Friday it is in the process of rolling back the update globally.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"height:400px\" class=\"lazyload-placeholder\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"group\">\n<p>CrowdStrike&#8217;s software requires deep access to a computer&#8217;s operating system to scan for threats. In the case of Friday&#8217;s outage, machines running Microsoft&#8217;s Windows operating system crashed due to a fault in the way a software update issued by CrowdStrike interacted with Windows.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD [blue screen of death]) and get stuck in a restarting state. We approximate impact started around 19:00 UTC on the 18th of July,&#8221; <span class=\"QuoteInBody-quoteNameContainer\" data-test=\"QuoteInBody\" id=\"RegularArticle-QuoteInBody-5\"><span class=\"waslinkname\">Microsoft<\/span><span class=\"QuoteInBody-inlineButton\"><span class=\"AddToWatchlistButton-watchlistContainer\" id=\"-WatchlistDropdown\" data-analytics-id=\"-WatchlistDropdown\"><button class=\"AddToWatchlistButton-watchlistButton\" aria-label=\"Add To Watchlist\" data-testid=\"dropdown-btn\"><span class=\"AddToWatchlistButton-addWatchListFromTag\"><\/span><\/button><\/span><\/span><\/span> said in an update at 5:40 a.m. ET.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We can confirm the affected update has been pulled by CrowdStrike. Customers that are continuing to experience issues should reach out to CrowdStrike for additional assistance,&#8221; the company added.<\/p>\n<p>Satnam Narang, senior staff researcher at Tenable, told CNBC on Friday that the outage was &#8220;very unprecedented.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The challenge here is that security software \u2014 because it&#8217;s doing its job to protect organizations \u2014 it has to have more privileged access to these machines,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>So, while people may be seeing their IT issues as a problem with Windows, &#8220;it&#8217;s not actually a Windows issue, it&#8217;s related to a faulty or bad update from those security software,&#8221; Narang added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h2 class=\"ArticleBody-subtitle\">A fix has been issued<\/h2>\n<div class=\"group\">\n<p>Earlier, Microsoft said its cloud services had been <span class=\"waslinkname\">restored after an outage<\/span> that affected its Azure services and Microsoft 365 suite of apps in the central U.S. region. A company spokesperson said these are two different and nonrelated issues \u2014 one issue relates to Azure, the other is linked to CrowdStrike.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div role=\"region\" aria-labelledby=\"Placeholder-ArticleBody-Video-108008807\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"group\">\n<p>They added that they &#8220;anticipate a resolution is forthcoming,&#8221; in respect to the CrowdStrike problem.<\/p>\n<p>CrowdStrike is &#8220;actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,&#8221; CEO George Kurtz said Friday in a update on social media platform X. He added that Mac and Linux hosts are not affected.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,&#8221;&nbsp;<span class=\"waslinkname\">Kurtz said<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>That fix could be hard to implement, though. Andy Grayland, chief information and security officer at threat intelligence firm&nbsp;Silobreaker, said that in order to implement a fix, engineers would have to go into each individual data center running windows.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;d then have to log in, navigate to a certain CrowdStrike file, delete it and then reboot the entire system, he said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Where machines are encrypted, complex encryption keys also need to be entered manually. Unless Microsoft and CrowdStrike (if they are involved) pull something miraculous out of the bag, this could be painful to recover from.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"group\">\n<div class=\"RelatedContent-relatedContent\" id=\"RegularArticle-RelatedContent-1\">\n<div class=\"RelatedContent-container\">\n<div class=\"RelatedContent-nonCollapsibleContent\">\n<h2 class=\"RelatedContent-header\">Don\u2019t miss these insights from CNBC PRO<\/h2>\n<div class=\"group\">\n<ul>\n<li><span class=\"waslinkname\">Buy these stocks if Trump and GOP win big in November, says Wolfe Research<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"waslinkname\">Goldman says investors should start shifting out of cash. Here\u2019s where it sees opportunity<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"waslinkname\">Bitcoin could be heading for a \u2018summer of 2021 style\u2019 correction between record highs, data shows<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"waslinkname\">Investors bet a Fed rate cut to spur rotation from crowded stocks to neglected as bull market continues<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div data-test=\"WildCardEmbed\">\n<div class=\"WildcardEmbed-wrapper\">\n<style> div { box-sizing: border-box; } .noselect { -webkit-touch-callout: none; \/* iOS Safari *\/ -webkit-user-select: none; \/* Safari *\/ -khtml-user-select: none; \/* Konqueror HTML *\/ -moz-user-select: none; \/* Old versions of Firefox *\/ -ms-user-select: none; \/* Internet Explorer\/Edge *\/ user-select: none; \/* Non-prefixed version, currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Opera and Firefox *\/ } .DO-widget-wrapper { width: 100%; max-width: 620px; background-color: #fff; } .DO-logo-row { margin-bottom: 10px; } .DO-body { border-top: 2px #289dcf solid; border-bottom: 2px #289dcf solid; padding: 12px 0 12px 0; margin-bottom: 20px; } .DO-bodycopy .DO-button { font-family: Proxima Nova,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } .DO-bodycopy {color: #424858; font-size: 18px; line-height: 31px; margin-bottom: 12px;} .DO-button { color: #fff; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; width: 120px; height: 30px; background-color: #0071bc; border-radius: 6px; text-transform: uppercase; padding: 4px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; margin-bottom: 4px; text-decoration: none !important; } .DO-button:hover { background-color: #0a94e0; text-decoration: none !important; } @media <\/style>\n<div class=\"DO-widget-wrapper\">\n<div class=\"DO-logo-row\"> <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/how-a-software-update-from-cyber-firm-crowdstrike-caused-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-it-blackouts.png\" width=\"248\" height=\"auto\" alt=\"Beyond the Valley\"> <\/div>\n<div class=\"DO-body\">\n<div class=\"DO-bodycopy\"> Get a weekly round up of the top tech stories from around the world in your inbox every Friday. <\/div>\n<p> <span class=\"waslinkname\"><\/p>\n<div class=\"DO-button noselect\">Subscribe<\/div>\n<p><\/span> <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"ArticleBody-MobileAdhesion\" class=\"MobileAdhesion-container\" data-module=\"mps-slot\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this article CRWD Follow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike Inc., speaks during the Montgomery Summit in Santa Monica, California. Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images A fault with an update issued by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike led to a cascade effect among global IT systems Friday, &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":72115,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bussiness","has-thumb","has-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72114"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}