Over 8 million machines running the Windows operating system were impacted by the outage caused by CrowdStrike in July 2024. These Windows machines could not boot and were stuck on a blue screen, famously known as the “blue screen of death.” This affected many businesses such as airlines, banks, and supermarkets–resulting in customer dissatisfaction, loss of revenue, and reputational damage. This incident shows that cyberattacks are not the only digital threat to businesses but the software to protect against these threats can also create severe problems. CISOs and IT cybersecurity teams must examine their cybersecurity software more stringently to prevent similar incidents from occurring. They should look to an agentless cybersecurity approach for their cybersecurity plan.
How The Outage Occurred?
Falcon, which is Extended Detection and Response (XDR) software from CrowdStrike, was the software running on millions of computers running the Windows operating system. …