What happened in the computer outage that hit banks, businesses and airports around the world

He cyber failure recorded early this Friday generated multiple effects on a global scale in banks, stores, airports and telecommunications companies.

The firm dedicated to cybersecurity, Crowd strike was blamed for the massive failure, following a problematic update to its software Falcon Sensor .

The latter is one of their most popular products and is used by many companies of great global importance .

Roughly, allows you to detect and block hacking threats, which requires deep access to the equipment’s operating system.

After the bugs were reported, CrowdStrike CEO and co-founder George Kurtz explained in a statement that This only affected Windows servers This is not the case for Mac or Linux.

With, He stressed that “this is not a security incident or a cyber attack ” and that “the problem has been identified, isolated and a solution has been implemented” .

However, the situation has led, for example, Airlines from different parts of the world have delayed or cancelled their flights .

University of California, Davis atmospheric scientist Colin McCarthy shared an image that depicts “a 12-hour window of American Airlines, Delta and United aircraft traffic” in the United States .

The animation visually represents one of the effects of what happened with failure.

As of Friday morning, more than 1,600 flights – domestic and international – have been canceled and another 4,000 have been delayed in the United States. according to the database Aware of thefts .

In addition to this and the long queues that formed at the airports, Problems have been reported at banks and supermarkets in various countries .

Cybersecurity Consultant Orion Hellis Leiva explains to La Tercera that “during the last hours It has been detected that an update to the software CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor installed on Windows operating systems caused constant reboot of these computers.

“The inability to turn on machines normally has affected technology services in many parts of the world. Currently There are already solutions to avoid this abnormal behavior, but they require some degree of manual intervention from those involved. “, he adds.

For his part, the director of UDP School of Computer Science and Telecommunications Luciano Ahumada, explains to La Tercera that Falcon Sensor is a surveillance system .

Then he said: “In very simple terms, What it does is analyze all the activity within the computer. If you detect any type of malware or an instance that could open a security hole, we could say that it “encapsulates” it to prevent”.

To accomplish this task requires deep access to the system, so “permission is given to do and undo” .

As an example, he explains that It’s like when operating system updates are implemented on cell phones and they come with flaws. .

In some cases there may be situations like an application closing unexpectedly until the problem is resolved.

“This happens often with updates of software. Falcon has many permissions and privileges to manage files and actions performed on the device. Since there was a buggy update, it ended up affecting the equipment in which it was installed” with Windows servers, Ahumada adds.

Leiva assures that “massiveness can be sized according to what software affected” .

“Firstly, We have CrowdStrike, which is one of the world leaders in cybersecurity. . According to a 2022 IDC study, CrowdStrike is positioned as the company with the largest presence worldwide, with a market share of 17.7%. At the time, its protection measures were said to extend to approximately 8.6 billion computers,” he adds.

To this it must be added that “The other related component is the Windows operating system, which is one of the most widely used systems in homes and businesses across various sectors.” .

Ahumada adds that, “It only takes a few lines of badly done code” in the update to cause problems .

He stresses, however, that are necessary, especially in security systems .

“They need to be constantly updated due to new variants or different types of malware who appear “, he adds.

“The impact will be directly limited to companies that use the aforementioned platforms: software CrowdStrike (Falcon Sensor) detection and protection installed on Windows operating systems “, underlines the Orion expert.

Yet he says that “Indirectly, Chilean companies that use service providers who suffer from this computer incident could be affected. because they might not deliver their solutions normally.

CrowdStrike CEO stressed that The cause of this issue was not a cyber attack or security issues. .

In the words of the UDP specialist, “The action plans they took in the protocols implemented are related to the failure they mention, that is, they released an update that failed” .

Similarly, Leiva points out that “So far, no organized cybercriminal group has claimed responsibility for a possible attack and there is no data that suggests such an attack.” “.