CrowdStrike Outage: Digital Catastrophe Lesson in Social Responsibility
On July 19, 2024, a financial and public safety catastrophe was caused by a few lines of flawed software code introduced to the internet. CrowdStrike Falcon, an industry leader in cybersecurity, used standard procedures to deploy an update to Microsoft Windows systems which crashed over 8.5 million servers. The crippled services crossed all segments of safety, transportation, commerce, media, defense, finance, medicine, and personal software applications. Though the bad code was corrected within a few hours, all impacted servers were required to be manually updated, restarted, and analyzed for lost information.
In completing this assignment, students should be able to:
1. Assess how interconnected systems benefit and threaten public safety
2. Analyze lessons learned from the CrowdStrike outage
3. Compare Information Security to National Security