Avoiding a Global outage – By not running the software that caused it!

Avoiding a Global outage – By not running the software that caused it!

In a article this morning ABC journalism competently managed to demonstrate a complete lack of awareness in the topic they were reporting on and a media story was born that has no basis to even exist in this reality, or the next.

Background

The recent Crowdstrike incident has raised (again), that cyber resilience is a part of business continuity, an errant fast track update designed to keep Crowd Strike customers safe was responsible for a global outage that was only limited to 8 million plus devices because it happened during the USA / Europe night time, if this had occurred during working hours the resultant affected businesses would have been globally catastrophic.

This issue is not a Crowdstrike issue, it is a global software industry and cloud service provider one.

TLDR – how to avoid a global IT outage

• Don’t use the software that was responsible for the outage
• Don’t know what software you are using either
• Be using an “additional” cloud somehow
• Conveyor belts and baggage seemed to still operate

Speaking with the CEO of Port Hedland Airport, the ABC journalist uncovered that the Airport had successfully avoided the BSOD (Windows critical error) cause by a Crowdstrike update published without testing to all of their clients, through not even using the software in Question.

The CEO mentions a German provider of cyber security software, my opinion is that this will be Heimdell, though whoever the provider is had no bearing on the Global IT outage which occurred on Friday.

For those of you following at home, this is a very valid mitigation process #sarcasm, don’t use software that caused an outage and you will not be directly affected by that outage either, although if you are code sharing with Delta then this may not be fully accurate.

There is not even any evidence that the Port Hedland Airport ran Crowdstrike prior to their move to another provider.

I plead for journalism to step their game up, it is one thing to write inaccurately around cyber security, it is completely another to write an article completely devoid of any useful information, yet to non cyber industry people will be taken as something of value, honestly I can not see the value but would love someone to comment and explain for me.

The above is mostly sarcasm, my ultimate goal is that we hold journalism to a higher standard because the topics we are dealing with influence Organisation boards and management teams who need good advice not articles that completely lack any useful detail.

Please reach out to me as always if I can help in any way here and stay safe.