The recent CrowdStrike outage sent shockwaves throughout the cybersecurity community, impacting millions of devices and causing significant disruptions for organizations worldwide.
CrowdStrike's clients, particularly those in Europe and Asia, faced major system crashes that brought operations to a halt and resulted in substantial financial losses. This incident, one of the largest of its kind, underscores the importance of taking a proactive approach to cybersecurity practices and disaster recovery preparations.
In this article, we'll explore what happened in the outage, the impact on businesses around the world, and how organizations can learn from this event, including partnering with a managed security service provider, to be ready for future cyberthreats.
The CrowdStrike Outage: What You Need to Know
CrowdStrike is one of the biggest cybersecurity firms; it’s known for its cloud-native Falcon platform, which provides continuous endpoint protection by securing devices such as computers and mobile phones from cyberthreats.
The Falcon platform uses a combination of artificial intelligence and behavioral analysis to detect and block threats based on abnormal activity patterns outside of what the device typically does. The system deploys agents on endpoints that are regularly updated to counter the latest threats and include other enhancements.
The Falcon platform also offers scalable, real-time protection with minimal impact on the performance of the device, helping security teams provide comprehensive security and enabling more rapid threat response.
However, the recent outage revealed that vulnerabilities can exist even in a robust system. In this case, a bug in CrowdStrike's cloud-based testing system led to a defect in a global update being pushed out, which caused a critical mismatch between input fields in the Falcon driver and the content of the update.
5 Lessons You Should Take from the CrowdStrike Outage
Want to give your organization the resilience it needs to steer clear of costly outages such as this? Here are five lessons your organization should take away from the CrowdStike outage:
1. Don’t overlook vendor due diligence.
One of the most critical takeaways from the CrowdStrike outage is the importance of continuous vendor due diligence.
It's not enough to assess a vendor's reliability and security only during the onboarding stage of your relationship with the firm. Instead, as the vendor’s product evolves and your security needs change, conduct ongoing assessments of its security and make adjustments to your security plans.
2. Have a structured patch management process.
The CrowdStrike incident also highlights the critical need for a structured patch and update management process.
While it’s tempting to lean on CrowdStrike’s development process, this situation proves that organizations should implement and maintain their own rigorous testing protocols, stress testing software updates in controlled environments before they are deployed into production.
Just this best practice alone could have mitigated the impact of the faulty update that caused the widespread crashes.
3. Have a trusted managed security service provider.
In times of crisis, having a trusted managed security service provider to turn to can accelerate how fast your business recovers while limiting the impact of an outage.
A reliable partner, such as All Covered, can provide comprehensive IT support and managed services that help your team stay ahead of threats and have a proven plan to respond when threats arise.
In this case, All Covered’s experts can assist in safely finding, testing, and implementing new technologies, ensuring that your organization remains protected while adopting innovations.
4. Establish disaster recovery procedures.
As any cybersecurity professional knows, it’s more of a “when” not “if” your business comes under attack.
Therefore, disaster recovery planning is essential for minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity during disruptions. In this case, the CrowdStrike outage highlights the need to proactively plan for potential system outages, replacements, and required adjustments and then to regularly test response strategies.
One common way to get started is to identify recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives for critical services, enabling teams to know which systems to prioritize to bring back online in the event of a failure.
5. Always focus on building resilience.
Cybersecurity programs should never be static; they require constant evaluation and improvement. Organizations should continuously seek ways to enhance their defenses by evaluating existing security controls, engaging external guidance, and fostering a security-conscious culture among employees.
Protect Your Business with All Covered
The CrowdStrike outage caused widespread chaos around the world—from crowded airports to global services grinding to a halt.
However, by stepping back, the event offers valuable lessons that businesses can take to improve their cybersecurity and disaster recovery measures, helping to protect their organization from similar—or worse—incidents in the future.
Want to see how your current strategies stack up against the best practices or wish to take your preparedness to the next level? Get started today.
