This isn’t a gloat post. In fact, I was completely oblivious to this massive outage until I tried to check my bank balance and it wouldn’t log in.
Apparently Visa Paywave, banks, some TV networks, EFTPOS, etc. have gone down. Flights have had to be cancelled as some airlines systems have also gone down. Gas stations and public transport systems inoperable. As well as numerous Windows systems and Microsoft services affected. (At least according to one of my local MSMs.)
Seems insane to me that one company’s messed up update could cause so much global disruption and so many systems gone down :/ This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.
I get the sentiment but defense in depth is a methodology to live by in IT and auto updating via the Internet is not a good risk to take in general. For example, should Crowdstrike just disappear one day, your entire infrastructure shouldn’t be at risk nor should critical services. Even if it’s your anti-virus, a virus or ransomware shouldn’t be able to easily propagate through the enterprise. If it did, then it is doubtful something like Crowdstrike is going to be able to update and suddenly reverse course. If it can then you’re just lucky that the ransomware that made it through didn’t do anything in defense of itself (disconnecting from the network, blocking CIDRs like Crowdsource’s update servers, blocking processes, whatever) and frankly you can still update those clients anyway from your own AV update server which is a product you’d be using if you aren’t allowing updates from the Internet in order to roll them out in dev first, phasing and/or schedules from your own infrastructure.
Crowdstrike is just another lesson in that.