The global ‘Blue screen’ problem is not the worst thing

The incident that occurred from the global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike updating its software was not the last warning.

Banks, airlines, television, and health systems around the world that use Microsoft 365 collectively shut down on a large scale early on July 19.

Thousands of flights and train services have been canceled globally, including more than 1,800 in the US. At the same time, many other public and retail services were also disrupted.

The incident occurred due to a technical issue after global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike updated its software. Earlier today, the CrowdStrike update caused several IT systems around the globe to crash,” Microsoft told CBS News.

The fragility of the global Internet

Founded by the famous former McAfee antivirus software chief and launched in 2012, CrowdStrike has always been the top name when it comes to next-generation security software. It is considered one of the best protections, against ransomware and other hacking risks.

However, Reuters quoted several industry analysts on the question of whether control of such critical, global software should be in the hands of only a handful of companies.

The consequences of this are now clear. The faulty file that caused the issue is believed to be related to the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor, a tool that analyzes Internet traffic to and from users’ computers, which is intended to check for malicious data.

Airports around the globe were paralyzed on July 19 due to an incident related to the CrowdStrike update that knocked down the Internet system. Photo: The National.

Half of Fortune 500 companies that use CrowdStrike software immediately fall victim to a series of devices that fail to boot and instead display a “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD).

The large-scale collapse incident has affected airlines particularly seriously. According to Reuters, many airlines have to rush to check in for passengers who buy tickets online by handwriting. Meanwhile, some airlines only accept passengers to board the plane after the ticket has been printed.

“This is a very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core Internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, former director of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre.

This large-scale Internet outage has also once again raised concerns among experts that many large organizations are still not well prepared to implement contingency plans in case a system or a piece of software in a technology system fails.

“It’s easy to assume that this is a disaster. It is also a hint that there must be a more diversified market. We have done a good job of managing the safety aspects of technology when it comes to cars, trains, planes, and machines. However, we are poor in providing services,” Martin added.

Before the global incident occurred, on June 4, several hospitals in London said they had to suspend operations and send patients to other medical facilities because of a cyberattack on a medical service provider.

Systems around the world that use Microsoft 365 were simultaneously shut down on a large scale early on July 19. Photo: Shutterstock.

In 2017, ransomware ransomware attacks were targeted by attackers at computers inside the UK’s National Healthcare Service (NHS), causing major disruption to the agency’s operations and causing computers to shut down.

Many hospitals in the UK have been forced to move patients from where the computers are infected with the malware. Staff at these hospitals also ask patients not to come to the hospital, unless there is an emergency.

At the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics (South Korea), a cyberattack almost prevented the event from taking place as scheduled.

Imminent danger

The July 19 incident will not be the last time the world is reminded of the dangerous dependence on computers and technology products to operate basic services.

In about 14 years, the world is forecast to face Epochalypse, or the 2038 crash, alluding to its similarity to the Y2K crash that caused the global computer system to collapse after New Year’s Eve in 2000.

The 2000 computer crash (also known as the Y2K crash, the Millennium Bug, or simply Y2K) was a computer crash that occurred at the very beginning of the year 2000.

The reason is that older generation computers, old electronic clock microchips, cannot tell the difference between 2000 and 1900, because they are programmed with the last two digits of the year to save storage space when the price of manufacturing computer hardware in the early stages was still expensive.

Because of this incident, many organizations, companies, and governments in many countries had to urgently patch and change their systems in 1999, if they didn’t want everything to be chaotic and collapse when they passed 2000.

Systems that use 32-bit binary factors to store information will stop working at 3:14:08 p.m. on Jan. 19, 2038. Photo: LinkedIn.

There are no accurate statistics on the amount of material wealth and human resources that have been spent to prevent this disaster. According to Wikipedia, it is estimated that the world spent more than $300 billion at the time to fix the problem, equivalent to $436 billion at the time of January 2018.

In 2006, market research firm IDC estimated that the U.S. spent about $134 billion on Y2K troubleshooting.

Eighteen years from now, a similar incident will occur when systems that use 32-bit binary coefficients to store information will stop working, because the “Unix time” exceeds the limit value of 3 hours, 14 minutes, and 8 seconds on January 19, 2038.

Compared to 2000, the 2038 incident is likely to have a devastating impact on a wider scale because it involves embedded systems in communication devices such as phones, routers or Wi-Fi broadcast equipment.

To cope, many computers have now switched to 64-bit systems that allow time to be stored for up to 292 billion years. However, this approach cannot be applied to data systems before 1970.