CrowdStrike Failure Reveals Thin Line Between Cyberattack and ‘Incident’

Called the largest IT outage in history, the defective content update pushed out by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike on July 19 affected 8.5 million Windows-based devices worldwide, the ripple effects of which are being felt three days later. The so-called Blue Screen of Death outage is attributed to CrowdStrike’s Falcon endpoint detection and response (EDR) software, which is widely used to protect systems from cyberattacks and malware infections. 

In this note, Javelin Strategy & Research highlights why financial services companies dependent on third parties must ensure they have adequate and necessary real-time responses from vendors upon which they rely for key services, ensuring that well-structured service-level agreements that highlight strategies for recovery from a cyber incident or failed update are in place when the agreements are signed. This note also explores risks financial institutions continue to face because of outdated business continuity and disaster recovery planning and strategy. It again makes an argument for consolidation at the C-suite level that eliminates redundancies and gaps between IT and risk teams.