Well, as most of you are aware, since I repeat myself occasionally, I try very hard to stick to quality, over quantity but reserve the right to publish different types of articles/e-mails. But also to increase the frequency if the necessity arises, not the case so far, but here this is a reminder of that. Also, the fog of “war” applies here.
In the rare case you live under Linux-based life or use Linux in your enterprise/workplace, or macOS, earlier today we the world suffered what is easily the biggest IT crash in history. You can grasp an idea of the extension by looking at the graph below.
Ironically enough the culprit is also in the image. CrowStrike, a cyber-security company. In fact one of the largest, and biggest single points of failure, cybersec companies on the entire planet. So what happened ?
In simple words, CrowdStrike sent an automated update to all its clients, and its client list is absurdly large. Airports, hospitals, chain stores, banks, innumerable tech companies, automation companies, automotive companies, and other fields of modern human activity in many countries – odds are they may use CrowdStrike.
Their software acts very “deep” into any system that uses it, thus this faulty software update created a loop in any system or server using Windows. Until a few hours ago, this could only be fixed physically, by an IT tech or a knowledgeable person either the faulty archive. This event will billions of dollars in economic damage, and second and third-order effects none of us can predict.
If this was just a fuck up, that is fine, disastrous of course, but “fine”, but I will assume malice. And I messaged a few experts, and read a few hundred messages from InfoSec Twitter, and the sentiment was the same. If this was done maliciously by a threat actor, this leaves us with only two options, given the absurd level of sophistication to pull this off.
Hellbound and Down 