The end of this week was marked by an unprecedented failure affecting computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, which had CrowdStrike software installed to protect against cyberattacks. It was this update that led , but Microsoft itself notes that the affected 8.5 million PCs actually represent less than 1% of the entire operating system fleet.
Estimates of the scope of the disaster were provided by Microsoft on the pages of . According to this operating system developer, the poorly executed update of the CrowdStrike Falcon software affected approximately 8.5 million computers in various countries around the world, but this number does not exceed 1% of all systems operating under Windows. Nevertheless, Microsoft's Vice President for operating system security, David Weston, stated in the blog: "While the percentage was not high, the extensive economic and social impact reflects the use of CrowdStrike by companies that control many critical services."
"The incident demonstrates the depth of interconnections in our broad ecosystem — global cloud service providers, software platforms, information security vendors, and other software. It also reminds all of us of the importance of a secure approach to software distribution and disaster recovery using already known mechanisms," continued the Microsoft representative. According to him, CrowdStrike has already provided the company with a scalable fix to restore the functionality of Amazon's cloud infrastructure. Microsoft is also working with Amazon and Google in search of the most effective methods for mitigating the incident's consequences. Furthermore, hundreds of Microsoft support specialists have been deployed to address these issues in the corporation's client infrastructure, and technical experts from the affected companies are being promptly provided with instructions to mitigate the failure.
Information security specialists have noted in passing that the widespread publicity of the incident in the media to this issue of attackers attempting to infiltrate the infrastructure of companies affected by failures under the guise of technical consultants from CrowdStrike or Microsoft. According to estimates, due to the necessity of manually removing CrowdStrike software update files on computers, the procedure for complete infrastructure recovery for some affected companies from several days to several weeks.
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Source: 3dnews.ru
