Lessons learned from CrowdStrike outages on releasing software updates
Summary
The endpoint detection software CrowdStrike made headlines for causing global outages on Windows machines around the world last Friday, leading to over 45,000 flight delays and over 5,000 cancellations, along with a number of other shutdowns, such as payment systems, healthcare services, and 911 operations. An update that was pushed by CrowdStrike to Windows machines that triggered a logic error causing the device to get the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). While we don’t know what specifically CrowdStrike’s testing process looked like, there are a number of basic steps that companies releasing software should be doing, explained Dr. Justin Cappos, professor of computer science and engineering at NYU. “I’m not gonna say they didn’t do any testing, because I don’t know … Fundamentally, while we have to wait for a little more detail to see what controls existed and why they weren’t effective, it’s clear that somehow they had massive problems here,” said Cappos. Paul Davis, field CISO at JFrog, agrees, noting that whenever he’s led security for companies, any major updates to the software would have been deployed slowly and the impact would be carefully monitored.