Bugs as Weapons – Lessons from the CrowdStrike Outage
CrowdStrike’s recent outage highlighted significant vulnerabilities in our digital infrastructure. Here’s why we need real consequences to ensure this never happens again.
My Take:
It has been a bad 11 days for CrowdStrike. The trouble is, a bad 11 days for CrowdStrike is a bad 11 days for everybody.
Whether you were trying to board an airplane or use public transport, bank online, access emergency services, or even just watch TV, people everywhere had their work and lives upended by what was likely the largest IT outage in history.
There has been a fair amount of post-mortem analysis of how we got to here. The prevailing take is that there was a logic flaw in Falcon sensor version 7.11 and above, resulting in its crash. The postmortem is essential — but looking at the past doesn’t mean jack if we’re not carrying those lessons into the future.
This has to be a wake-up call. Bugs, errors, and omissions like this turn into weapons faster than you can imagine. We just helped our adversaries learn a little bit more about how to take down our electric grid. One lousy engineer should not be able to sow chaos at this scale.
Two key things need to happen next.
ENFORCEMENT: Cyber Command needs to step up and take a more muscular approach. It’s not just about monitoring for cybersecurity; they need to ensure it. This is not a regulatory imperative -- it’s a national security imperative. After the 2008 collapse, Treasury was deputized to conduct stress tests on banks. I think it’s time that Cyber Command and related federal agencies be granted the oversight and authority to conduct cyber stress tests for companies like CrowdStrike.
CONSEQUENCES: When bank executives don’t pass Treasury’s stress tests, they get fined. When CrowdStrike deletes hundreds of billions of dollars of market value, we shrug our shoulders. This is a case of what economists call “moral hazard.” It’s a dangerous precedent if the entire world can be interrupted and a company’s only concern is that they’ll be dragged in front of some angry senators and have their hand slapped. There need to be real consequences that incentivize everybody to do better.
It could’ve been worse. It could’ve been nefarious. Collectively we need to take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.
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