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The CrowdStrike lesson — risk recognition, single points of failure and Zero Trust
It’s been a couple of days since the CrowdStrike incident occurred and the world is starting to resume some sort of normality after massive technology outage that was caused by a flawed software update being sent to millions of computers. The update of a “sensor configuration update” rendered impacted Windows systems useless. These updates are released regularly, sometimes several times a day, as an ongoing part of the protection mechanisms of the company’s Falcon platform.
The precise reasons this flawed update was allowed to be pushed out are still being investigated. But three decades of working in the IT industry tell me the root cause will come down to a combination of human error and a failure of test procedures. But that’s not the big lesson. What we have learned is that a single piece of seemingly innocuous software that can be updated many times a week, without any interaction from end-users, can bring a computer system to its knees.
While CrowdStrike and thousands of IT support teams all over the world scramble to remediate systems (CrowdStrike has done a good job of issuing fixes and providing guidance) I wonder how many really understand how deeply embedded some software products are and the impact of a bad update.
