I've had trouble nailing down if thats the case from searching around online. And if thats true - thats absolutely on Crowdstrike. And that behavior should disqualify it from being used on critical systems. I imagine this incident will cause a lot of teams to consider just what can happen automatically on their systems.
The nature of “content updates” vs a full product update. Though you may be right, perhaps they provide controls for those updates, I’ve never used their software. But doesn’t sound like it.
It's on CrowdStrike, but it's also on IT for even allowing installation of critical software like this that has a bypass at all. Updates shouldn't even be allowed to bypass IT's safe rollout procedures, at least not without IT signing off on it anyway.
You're living in a different reality. I can't fathom how anybody could legitimately make that claim.
Even if you're defining "critical system" as "critical to humans" and not "critical to the business", then sure, you can say "Airlines aren't critical" and for most passengers, yeah, you're probably right. Most industries aren't critical, so businesses being ground to a halt doesn't matter for the consumers.
But 911 systems were affected, and those are certainly critical to humans. If 911 doesn't work, ambulances and fire trucks can't be dispatched, and people die.
EDIT: Computers attached to hospital beds, including trauma surgery rooms, were affected. I'm really curious what you think defines a critical system.
One interesting thing I saw is, per a snippet that claimed to be part of Crowd Strike's ToS, it shouldn't have been installed on any of those machines where human life depended upon it (along with no nuclear facilities and a few other exceptions). Is there going to be any fallout from people installing it on systems the software wasn't designed for? Did Crowd Strike perhaps know it was being installed on these systems but ignored it since they were getting paid and it wasn't them violating the agreement?
if a user does something the manufacturer told them specifically not to do, I have a hard time blaming the manufacturer for it. Within an approved use? absolutely, blame the manufacturer.
but if you shoot yourself in the foot, don't blame the bowyer just because they sold the bow to you.
The 911 system itself is critical sure. I never said it wasn't. When the computer systems supporting 911 went down due to crowdstrike, those functions were replaced with available backups, that were planned for situations like this, e.g. using analog phones and taking notes by hand (just like they used to do it).
If the system survives (albeit with diminished capacity) loss of a component, then that component is not critical for the system. That's basically the definition of "critical".
If that's the case, that doesn't change GP's point: if Crowdstrike can bypass your org's controls on rolling out updates to its software, it shouldn't be used.
Didn't day say in their incident report that they have a batched rollout strategy for software updates but this was a config update and the update path for configs does not have such a mechanism in place.
Ya, so hopefully it's obvious to them that every rollout needs some kind of batching. I get that all devices within one org might need to have the same config, but in that case batch it out to different orgs over 2-3 days.
Maybe the more critical infrastructure and health care orgs are at the end of that rollout plan so they are at lower risk. It's not ideal if one sandwich shop in Idaho can't run their reports that day, but that's far better than shutting down the hospital next door. CrowdStrike could even compensate those one system shops that are on the front line when something goes down.
Again, better to pay a sandwich shop a few thousand dollars for their lost day of sales than get sued by the people in the hospital who couldn't get their meds, x-rays, etc in time.
