if you woke up today you should probably just go back to sleep because your windows work computer will likely have a blue screen of death today Millions if not billions of Windows computers got instab bricked around the world thanks to an update pushed by Enterprise cyber security firm crowd strike and it's bad airports are shutting down hospitals are unable to treat patients the banks aren't able to get your money and the RB's drive-through window went down forcing people to hunt stray cats in the street just for food what's hilarious though is that a top cyber
security firm just messed up the global economy in a way that the evil hackers they protect you from could only dream of in today's video we'll take a look at the technical side of This Disaster and find out how such a catastrophic mistake like this can even happen in the modern world it is July 19th 2024 and you're watching the code report Corporate America is in panic mode right now because everybody's work computers are bricked and that means the hamsters can't keep spinning the wheels a huge number of Fortune 500 companies use crowd strike for
cyber security it's got over 500 clients on the fortune 1000 list its primary product is called Falcon a tool that provides endo protection using artificial intelligence and analytics to detect threats in real time it is publicly traded and its stonk is down right now and for good reason because everybody's blaming them for causing Windows to deliver its blue screen of death luckily Mac OS users and Linux Chads are unaffected to understand why we first need to understand how Cloud strikes Falcon sensor actually works it's installed just like regular software but integrates with the operating system
at a low level often using kernel mode drivers and basically just sits there in the background looking for anomalies it collects Telemetry data produces reports and offers a bunch of other incomprehensible techno nonsense products to justify multi-million dollar Enterprise contracts but the bottom line is that it's third party software that sits in the critical path of a computer which means if it fails the Entire Computer might fail and that's exactly what happened here apparently an automated software update last night had some bad code in it and every computer that got that update is now dead
now part of the reason this is really bad oh my God is this bad is that it's not just a regular outage but every affected computer needs to be rebooted in fail mode so the driver can be removed manually and most employees don't have access to do that on their own and that means it guys are going to be really busy today it's the IT guy equivalent of being a surgeon in World War I and the consequences are real the London Stock Exchange was disrupted most Indian airports went down causing them to write boarding passes
by hand along with a ton of other issues to Cloud strikes credit they were quick to point out that it's not a security incident or Cyber attack and explained it this way yeah listen uh we up but they were quick to fix it and the fix is really easy all you have to do is detach the operating system disc create a snapshot or backup of the disc mount a volume to a new virtual server navigate to the winder driver's directory locate the file c291 CIS and delete it detach the volume from the new virtual server
then reattach the fixed volume to the impacted virtual server piece of cake but option two is to go to Home Depot and buy a sledgehammer then use it to uninstall Microsoft Windows and switch to Linux I do feel really bad for the programmer who updated this driver though because the tech lead's about to run get blame and blame them for this whole mess not only is this person about to get fired but they also have blood on their hands for shutting down the hospitals Transportation networks and arb's family restaurants that we need to survive if
you're that guy and you're watching this don't feel too bad though what we have here is a situation where the Cure is more harmful than the disease the public Mega corporations are under a ton of pressure to secure their computer systems and they're constantly audited by Third parties a company like Macy's is going to go out and hire a team of a 100 cyber security weirdos instead they'll pay a company like Cloud strike a few million dollars a year to figure out cyber security for them giving them someone else to blame when their system gets
hacked what everyone failed to realize though is that giving one company kernel access to the computers of most Fortune 500 companies might actually be a bad idea because it only takes one automatic update with a misplace zero to nearly destroy the entire world this has been the code report thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one
