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Breaches, Break-ins, and Blunders



Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

Humpty Dumpty had a big fall

All the kings horses and all the kings men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again!


This page is dedicated to the corporate management bafoons, and IT geniuses who always know better than us common folk, especially when it comes to cyber security. However, they have forgotten what a full backup, incremental backup, hot backup, offsite backup, replication or standby servers are, or what they’re used for... The following stories are true, and a testament to IT shops nationwide. And their utter contempt for sensible computing:


(Un-)HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!!

On July 19, 2024 (UTC), cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike pushed a faulty config update to its Falcon Sensor security client for Windows. The update contained a mismatch—21 fields instead of the expected 20—triggering a kernel‐level crash (blue screen of death) in Windows 10 and 11 systems globally.


🌐 Global disruption

·        Approximately 8.5 million Windows devices crashed worldwide—nearly 1% of all Windows systems.

·        The failure sparked massive outages across sectors: airlines (leading to flight cancellations), hospitals (EHR and fetal monitoring down), banks, retail stores, broadcasters, emergency call centers, and even cloud infrastructures like Azure and GCP

·        In hospitals, over 750 U.S. institutions were affected—200 experiencing critical patient-care disruptions.


💸 Financial impact

·        Global damages have been estimated between $10 billion (widely reported) and as high as $15 billion by insurers.

·        A U.K. study alone pegged losses at £1.7–2.3 billion (~$2.2–2.9 billion).

·        Large U.S. corporations, including airlines, suffered roughly $5.4 billion in uninsured losses


✈️ High-profile fallout

·        Delta Airlines canceled ~7,000 flights over five days, affecting 1.3 million passengers and estimating losses at $500 million.

·        Delta later sued CrowdStrike for damages.


🛠 Resolution & aftereffects

·        Within hours, CrowdStrike detected the fault and released a fix, but many Windows systems required manual intervention.

·        The incident raised alarm about the risks of centralized dependencies in cybersecurity and kernel-level broad access.

·        CrowdStrike responded with public apologies, customer credits totaling ~$60–88 million, and transparency by attending DEF CON Pwnie Awards to accept a tongue-in-cheek “epic fail” trophy.


🔍 Summary

·        Date: July 19, 2024 (impact into July 20)

·        Cause: Faulty Falcon Sensor update with config error

·        Scale: 8.5M+ devices crashed; multi‑sector global outage

·        Estimated cost: $10–15 billion worldwide, including large uninsured losses

·        Notable suit: Delta sues for $500 million

·        Key takeaway: Even well-tested security tools can have catastrophic downstream consequences at scale. Organizations must consider patch rollouts, segmentation, and rapid rollback capabilities.

·        Lesson(s) learned: NEVER depend on one company for cyber protection of your corporate data. ALWAYS trust your cyber/SCADA/physical security to the man who wears the star… At Houdini Global Security, we truly do care about protecting you’re a$$ets.

 

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