CrowdStrike: Detecting Cyber Threats in Healthcare Environments via Crowd Strike Searches and Redeployments
The extent of the disruption appeared to vary both between and within healthcare systems. A nurse posted on X that the hospital was down due to theCrowdstrike issue. It is a hands on kind of day. I hope our patients remain safe.” Rosenberg says that at Michigan Medicine, where he was awake since 1 am dealing with the crisis, anywhere from 15 to 60 percent of the computers were not working, depending on the unit.
CrowdStrike has a role in helping companies find and prevent security breeches, it billing itself as the “fastest mean time to detect threats”. Since its launch in 2011, the Texas-based company has helped investigate major cyberattacks, such as the Sony Pictures hack in 2014, as well as the Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016. As of Thursday evening, CrowdStrike’s valuation was upwards of $83 billion.
Impact of an IT outage on a healthcare system and airline: Lukasz Olejnik, a cybersecurity expert on the case of an Indian airline
The software update may have caused the core Windows operating system to be stuck in a boot loop. Users will be able to try and figure out what happened if they try to restart the PC after seeing an Error message that says Windows did not load correctly. This airline in India uses the old-fashioned method of doing things by hand.
“Our software is extremely interconnected and interdependent,” Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher, consultant, and author of the book Philosophy of Cybersecurity, tells The Verge. “But in general, there are plenty of single points of failure, especially when software monoculture exists at an organization.”
Getting things up and running will be difficult after CrowdStrike has deployed a fix. The issue may take days to weeks to resolve because IT administrators may need to have physical access to a device to get it working again. How fast that happens depends on the size and resources of a company’s IT team. Olejnik thinks that the majority of the systems will be recovered.
Around the globe, doctors, nurses and hospital administrators were going into panic mode as they raced to manage the consequences of the largest IT outage in history. Mass General Brigham, one of America’s biggest healthcare systems, cancelled all non-urgent surgeries, procedures, and medical visits. The systems used in the delivery of radiotherapy treatments have been impacted by a critical incident. Hospitals in Canada, Germany, and Israel have started to have issues with their digital services, and the emergency service in some US states is down. One of the largest non-profit healthcare systems in the country and a lab that does routine bloodwork can’t process it. The lack of a working internet meant officers had to be dispatched manually.
This was not an isolated incident, as it soon became clear. A cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike had made a routine update to its Falcon antivirus product, utilized by companies ranging from banks to airlines to hospitals. All computers running the software on a Windows operating system crashed after that update contained a bug.
“The impact is massive,” he says. “It affects all aspects of modern digital health systems. In units where the computers are being used the whole time, like the emergency departments and the Intensive Care Units, the computers did not take the CrowdStrike application upgrade, whereas in areas of healthcare which are more sporadic, the disruption is much greater.