Crowdstrike triggering “Blue screen of death”...by Navraj Singh Gill
Chandigarh: The Microsoft outage, showing an error message on the blue screen known in the industry as the “blue screen of death” triggered due to an update in the cybersecurity software of one of the leading cybersecurity firms CrowdStrike reminds of the movie “Leave the world behind”.
An apocalyptic thriller in which people find it hard to comprehend the world once a cyberattack sort of blackout takes place with airplane flights going haywire and automated cars taking over the roads.
With an update in cybersecurity software, the Windows host faced outage globally leading to disruption in services ranging from TV channels going offline to flights being grounded. Worldwide thousands of clients of CrowdStrike and users of Microsoft as well as shareholders of both were hit badly as the price of shares plummeted.
Although it was only a software update that led to this event not a cybersecurity threat or attack. And the update was to protect against the cyber security threats and safeguard CrowdStrike clients.
Not under a malicious attack still the worldwide lockdown of IT services took place. CrowdStrike stated that they are working on it and reasonable questions bogged down my brain with the kind of dependency the world is having on the IT industry.
An update can disrupt operations worldwide and a cyberattack would lead to blackout leading to irreversible damage.
Here comes to the light that an update can be undone but a cyberattack would be more detrimental. Unintentional disruption in services due to some faulty code like the one under discussion, leading to damage and damage caused by cyberattacks leading to disruption are clearly two different things in IT world.
Such an event which was in hindsight of IT experts for years and yet came out as Black Swan. Dependency on technology is one thing whereas dependency on single huge tech company altogether portrays a different story.
The scale of impact it can have worldwide. Almost 8.5million devices with Microsoft operating system were affected.
The underlying complex interdependent nature of a network of devices as well as of softwares’ interacting within and also with others raises the level up of the vulnerable side of IT world.
The system thrives on interaction and networking with other devices and the contrary survives by protecting itself from the same.Faulty code can be identified and isolated whereas the world's dependency on IT industry and IT world interdependency continues.
Nevertheless, one’s loss is always others gain meanwhile Mac and Linux users make the hay while the sun shines. Yet a lot of employees in the IT sector enjoyed unannounced off from work because of this disaster.
July 23, 2024
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Navraj Singh Gill, Blogger
gillrajbans@gmail.com
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