How CrowdStrike updates took down systems around the world
An update from cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike (CRWD) is causing chaos around the world, with airlines, hospital systems, businesses and banks facing massive outages. Yahoo Finance Technology Editor Dan Howley appears on Market Domination to discuss the impact and how affected companies are dealing with the outage. The outage occurred when CrowdStrike sent out an update to its software. The update affected Microsoft (MSFT) systems used by everything from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Howley explains, “When an update is released, it points out various flaws in the system, and attackers know what the flaws are. When an update is released, that information is made public. Attackers aren’t stupid, so they know what the update fixes. If companies don’t apply these updates to fix the flaws, attackers can target them. So the update was rolled out across CrowdStrike’s customers, and that’s why we saw this massive cascade of outages.” He adds that CrowdStrike is working to distribute a patch, but it may take some time for companies to get the fix. In the meantime, some businesses are manually fixing the issues where they can to get operations back on track. But Howley points out, “This is not something that can be automated, so it’s not something that’s going to go away. It’s something that’s going to take a while to fully remediate.” For more expert insights and the latest market trends, click here to watch this full episode of Market Domination. This post was written by Melanie Riehl.