Last week, a faulty firmware update from CrowdStrike created a massive ripple effect, causing disruptions across banking, retail, emergency communications, and aviation sectors. This incident grounded or delayed 3,000 flights and threw numerous systems into chaos.
Initially, CrowdStrike’s update was blamed, leading to confusion and finger-pointing at Microsoft. CEO Satya Nadella clarified, “CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally.” While this statement was accurate, it barely scratched the surface of the problem.
CrowdStrike attributed the glitch to a “defect found in a single content update for Windows,” but the issue was not linked to a cyber threat. Unfortunately, the problem highlighted a significant oversight: Why didn’t CrowdStrike catch this issue before it wreaked havoc?
In this blog, we’ll explore how CrowdStrike’s oversight occurred and share best practices to ensure your technology performs reliably and avoids unwanted headlines.
Where Did CrowdStrike Go Wrong?
CrowdStrike’s official statements pointed to a failure in their internal quality control processes. A sensor configuration update intended to enhance Windows systems as part of their Falcon platform introduced a logic error, causing system crashes and affecting over 8 million users with the dreaded “blue screen of death” (BSOD).
According to Microsoft Copilot, “The issue arose due to a flaw in the Content Validator, allowing problematic data to slip through safety checks. CrowdStrike has since added a new check to prevent a recurrence.”
The lesson here is straightforward: Better quality testing could have prevented this. Instead of identifying the flaw during a “thorough root cause analysis” after the fact, early and rigorous testing could have identified and addressed the issue before release, preventing widespread disruption.
The Importance of Early Testing
The impact of negative headlines can be severe, affecting customer loyalty, stock prices, and even leading to financial penalties. CrowdStrike’s failure to properly test their update before deployment emphasizes the need for thorough pre-release testing. Effective testing early in the development cycle can save time, money, and protect your brand’s reputation.
From our experience at ASIC Cybersecurity, issues detected early cost significantly less to fix compared to those discovered later in the process. For instance, a bug fixed during development might cost $100, but if found by a QA team, costs can rise to 10 times that amount. If detected during system tests, costs can soar to 50-100 times, and if a customer uncovers it, expenses could skyrocket by more than 10,000 times, not to mention potential damage to your brand’s trust.
How to Avoid Costly Mistakes
To avoid costly mistakes and ensure successful product rollouts, adopt a rigorous testing strategy. Define and conduct a comprehensive range of performance, regression, and quality assurance tests under various real-world conditions. This includes simulating traffic spikes, peak network conditions, poor Internet connections, and potential cyberattacks.
Testing should simulate large-scale user traffic, including typical and unusual use cases, and emulate diverse access technologies and media (LANs, wireless, satellite, cable, fiber, etc.) in a controlled environment.
At ASIC Cybersecurity, our solutions from Apposite Technologies simplify this process. The “lab in a box” tools enable engineers and IT teams to perform effective testing without requiring specialized expertise. By incorporating these testing practices into your development workflow, you can ensure that your products perform as expected and maintain a strong cybersecurity posture.
To learn more about how to thoroughly test new technologies before release, explore our solutions for emulating real-world network conditions and generating realistic application and cyberattack traffic.