On Friday, July 19, 2024, IT departments all over the world experienced third party nightmares. This happens to coincide with the CrowdStrike update that made an estimated 8.5 million Windows devices nonfunctional. CrowdStrike is a leading cybersecurity company that many organizations utilize to protect their devices, networks, and data. For more information from CrowdStrike on the incident or if you have been impacted by this and need remediation steps, checkout CrowdStrike’s Remediation and Guidance Hub.
So what happened
On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike issued an update that was not fully tested to one of their solutions. This faulty update then proceeded to make 8.5 million Windows devices unusable. CrowdStrike utilized a Content Validator with the update, but the Validator passed the validation of the update, despite the update containing “problematic content data.” Meaning, the tool used to validate the update as good, did not work properly and allowed a bad update to go unnoticed. Then this update was pushed to the Windows devices that have the CrowdStrike solution installed.
The instant aftermath
Once these Windows devices started receiving this update, all pandemonium broke out. The update caused the device to crash with a blue screen, commonly known as BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Since the update stayed on the devices, they would continue to crash every time the user would boot it up.
Don’t give up
Whenever you hear or read of cybersecurity companies failing, it can be easy to give up on cybersecurity. I urge you though, to not let this happen! It is important to remember, these companies can still make mistakes or their solutions can’t protect 100% of every threat every time. All the different cybersecurity solutions, best practices, processes, policies, and everything else are all part of the many layers of cybersecurity. Think of the skin on an onion how each separate layer helps protect the edible part of the onion, cybersecurity is similar. Each different protective layer of cybersecurity is protecting your onion (your business data).
Don’t let these third party nightmares make you lose any sleep!
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