CrowdStrike: How one tiny bug could shut down millions of computers
CrowdStrike is blaming a bug in an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to push bad data out to millions of customer computers, setting off a global tech outage that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers
.The company promised to take measures in the future to prevent similar outages, including staggering the rollout of updates, giving customers more control over when and where they occur, and providing more details about the updates that it plans.
CrowdStrike on Wednesday posted details online from its āpreliminary post incident reviewā of the outage, which caused chaos for the many businesses that pay for the cybersecurity firmās software services.
The problem involved an āundetected errorā in the content configuration update for its Falcon platform affecting Windows machines, the Texas company said.
A bug in the content validation system allowed āproblematic content dataā to be deployed to CrowdStrikeās customers.
You might like
That triggered an āunexpected exceptionā that caused a Windows operating system crash, the company said.
CrowdStrike has said a āsignificant numberā of the 8.5 million computers that crashed on Friday, causing global disruptions, were back in operation as customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.
Once its investigation is complete, CrowdStrike said it would publicly release its full analysis of the meltdown.
The outage caused days of widespread technological havoc, highlighted how much of the world depends on a few key providers of computing services and drawn the attention of regulators who want more details on what went wrong.
Want to see more stories from InDaily Qld in your Google search results?
- Click here to set InDaily Qld as a preferred source.
- Tick the box next to "InDaily Qld". That's it.
