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CrowdStrike IT outage affected 8.5 million Windows devices, Microsoft says

Microsoft says it estimates that 8.5m computers around the world were disabled by the global IT outage.

It’s the first time a figure has been put on the incident and suggests it could be the worst cyber event in history.

The glitch came from a security company called CrowdStrike which sent out a corrupted software update to its huge number of customers.

Microsoft, which is helping customers recover said in a blog post: “We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices.”

negativenull ,
@negativenull@lemmy.world avatar

The downstream effects are likely much much greater. If an auth server/DB server/API server/etc (for example) got taken down, the failure cascades

Mothra ,
@Mothra@mander.xyz avatar

8.5M worldwide? I was expecting higher numbers, interesting

ArtVandelay ,
@ArtVandelay@lemmy.world avatar

Even if 8.5m is correct, with many being servers, the total people affected is much much higher.

rozodru ,
@rozodru@lemmy.ca avatar

cool, now do away with bitlocker so it won’t happen again. if the easiest solution was to boot into safemode and either delete the empty sys file or rename the folder or delete it then that should have been that. you shouldn’t lock that access away to boot into safe or recovery mode behind bitlocker where your codes for it are…gee willykers…on servers tied in with crowdstrike.

Even before all this when I still used Windows, bitlocker was such a pain in the ass to deal with.

SketchySeaBeast ,
@SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca avatar

“Don’t encypt your drives containing sensitive company data” is a hard sell.

danc4498 ,

I wonder how much this cost people & businesses.

For instance, people’s flights were canceled because of this resulting in them having to stay in hotels overnight. I’m sure there’s many other examples.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

CrowdStrike will ultimately have contract terms that put responsibility on the companies, and truth be told the companies should be able to handle this situation with relative ease. Maybe the discussion here should be on the fragility of Windows and why Linux is a better option.

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Linux could have easily been bricked in a similar fashion by pushing a bad kernel or kernel module update that wasn’t tested enough. Not saying it’s the same as Windows, but this particular scenario where someone can push a system component just like that can fuck up both.

rozodru ,
@rozodru@lemmy.ca avatar

yeah but with Linux if that were the case it’s an easy fix. it’s not locked behind something like bitlocker. I mean i’m on an Arch distro which…yeah…I break all the time including the kernal. the fix is simple. before I get too deep into something I always have my snapshots on an external drive that is updated at boot, twice a week, and 3 times a month. If I fuck it up I may, at most, loose a couple days of changes. and with Borg all my data is automatically backed up constantly so it’s not an issue.

worse comes to worse if all that fails I can easily reinstall with the iso’s I have (or use it as an excuse to try out a different distro). And with distros today it takes all of 5min to reinstall the OS.

hydrashok ,

Tell me you’ve never administered at scale without telling me you’ve never administered at scale.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

Yes it can, but a kernel update is a completely different scenario, and managed individually by companies as part of their upgrades. It is usually tested and rolled out incrementally.

Furthermore, Linux doesn’t blue screen. I know some scenarios where Linux has issues, but I can count on one finger the amount of times I’ve had an update cause issues booting… and that was because I was using some newer encryption settings as part of systemd.

However, it would take all my fingers & toes, and then some, to count the number of blue screens I’ve gotten with Windows… and I don’t think I’m alone in that regard.

catloaf ,

Linux doesn’t blue screen, no. A kernel panic is a black screen.

Darkassassin07 ,
@Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca avatar

Terms which should be void as this update was pushed to systems that explicitly disabled automatic updates.

Companies were literally raped by Crowdstrike.

/edit Sauce (bottom paragraph)

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

Companies were not raped by CrowdStrike. They were raped by their own ineptitude.

No where have I seen evidence where these updates were disabled and still got pushed. I’m not saying it is impossible, but unlikely if they followed any common sense and best practices. Usually, you’d be monitoring traffic and asking yourself why it is still checking for updates despite being disabled before deploying it to your entire IT infrastructure.

I see a lot of bad faith arguments here against CrowdStrike. I agree that they messed up, but it pales in comparison in my book to how messed up these companies are for not doing any basic planning around IT infrastructure & automation to be able to recover quickly.

ricecake ,

In this case, it’s really not a Linux/windows thing except by the most tenuous reasoning.

A corrupted piece of kernel level software is going to cause issues in any OS.
Cloudstrike itself has actually caused kernel panics on Linux before, albeit less because of a corrupted driver and more because of programming choices interacting with kernel behavior. (Two bugs: you shouldn’t have done that, and it shouldn’t have let you).

Tenuously, Linux is a better choice because it doesn’t need this type of software as much. It’s easier and more efficient to do packet inspection via dedicated firewall for infrastructure, and the other parts are already handled by automation and reporting tools you already use.
You still need something in this category if you need to solve the exact problem of “realtime network and filesystem event monitoring on each host”, but Linux makes it easier to get right up to that point without diving into the kernel.
Also vendors managing auto update is just less of a thing on Linux, so it’s more the cultural norm to manage updates in a way that’s conducive to staggering that would have caught this.

Contract wise, I’m less confident that crowd strike has favorable terms.
It’s usually consumers who are straddled with atrocious terms because they neither have power nor the interest in digging into the specifics too far.
Businesses, particularly ones that need or are interested in this category of software, inevitably have lawyers to go over contract terms in much more detail and much more ability to refuse terms and have it matter to the vendor. United airlines isn’t going to accept the contract terms of caveat emptor.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

You assume that businesses operate in good faith. That they thoroughly review contracts to ensure that they are fair and in the best interests of all its employees. Do you really think Greg, a VP of Cloud Solutions that makes 500k a year, who gets his IT advice on the golf course by AWS, Microsoft, & Oracle reps. Who gets wined & dined almost weekly by these reps, and a speaking spot at re:Invent, and believes Gartner when it says spending $5 million a month on cloud hosting and $90/TB on Egress traffic is normal, has the company’s best interests in mind?

I’ve seen companies pay millions for things they never used, or that weren’t ever provided by the vendor. You go to your managers, and say… “hey, why are we paying for this?” and suddenly you’re the bad guy. I’d love for you to prove me wrong. I’ve found pieces of progress before, within isolated teams when a manager wanted to actually accomplish something. It never lasts though… its like being an ice cube in a glass full of warm water.

autotldr Bot ,

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Microsoft says it estimates that 8.5m computers around the world were disabled by the global IT outage.It’s the first time that a number has been put on the incident, which is still causing problems around the world.The glitch came from a cyber security company called CrowdStrike which sent out a corrupted software update to its huge number of customers.Microsoft, which is helping customers recover said in a blog post: “we currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices.”

The post by David Weston, vice-president, enterprise and OS at the firm, says this number is less than 1% of all Windows machines worldwide, but that “the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services”.The company can be very accurate on how many devices were disabled by the outage as it has performance telemetry to many by their internet connections.The tech giant - which was keen to point out that this was not an issue with it’s software - says the incident highlights how important it is for companies such as CrowdStrike to use quality control checks on updates before sending them out.“It’s also a reminder of how important it is for all of us across the tech ecosystem to prioritize operating with safe deployment and disaster recovery using the mechanisms that exist,” Mr Weston said.The fall out from the IT glitch has been enormous and was already one of the worst cyber-incidents in history.The number given by Microsoft means it is probably the largest ever cyber-event, eclipsing all previous hacks and outages.The closest to this is the WannaCry cyber-attack in 2017 that is estimated to have impacted around 300,000 computers in 150 countries.

There was a similar costly and disruptive attack called NotPetya a month later.There was also a major six-hour outage in 2021 at Meta, which runs Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

But that was largely contained to the social media giant and some linked partners.The massive outage has also prompted warnings by cyber-security experts and agencies around the world about a wave of opportunistic hacking attempts linked to the IT outage.Cyber agencies in the UK and Australia are warning people to be vigilant to fake emails, calls and websites that pretend to be official.And CrowdStrike head George Kurtz encouraged users to make sure they were speaking to official representatives from the company before downloading fixes.

“We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” he said in a blog post.Whenever there is a major news event, especially one linked to technology, hackers respond by tweaking their existing methods to take into account the fear and uncertainty.According to researchers at Secureworks, there has already been a sharp rise in CrowdStrike-themed domain registrations – hackers registering new websites made to look official and potentially trick IT managers or members of the public into downloading malicious software or handing over private details.Cyber security agencies around the world have urged IT responders to only use CrowdStrike’s website to source information and help.The advice is mainly for IT managers who are the ones being affected by this as they try to get their organisations back online.But individuals too might be targeted, so experts are warning to be to be hyper vigilante and only act on information from the official CrowdStrike channels.

The original article contains 551 words, the summary contains 552 words. Saved -0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

dentoid ,
@dentoid@sopuli.xyz avatar

Upvoted just for the tagline “reduced article from 551 to 552 words” 😁 Wacky bot

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