Crowdstrike have released their detailed Root Cause Analysis of the incident that caused worldwide havoc on Friday 19 July 2024 for which the financial damage has been estimated to be as high as £8 billion.

It’s quite a read so what’s the bottom line?

The headline summary of the Crowdstrike’s mitigation steps are as follows:

1. Update and Improve Test Procedures
2. Increase Test Coverage
3. Create Additional Checks
4. Staging Update and Service roll-outs.
5. Provide customer control over the deployment of updates
6. Independent third-party validation and review of end-to-end quality processes.

At DOQEX we can only agree that testing and quality control are vital for delivering secure services. 

Some may equally argue that such steps should have been in place a long time ago.

Without repeating a lot of commentary that has already been well-discussed by numerous observers, it is worth stating that this sort of incident would and perhaps should destroy most vendors, especially those in the business of trust and security.

Link to full summary:
https://www.crowdstrike.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Channel-File-291-Incident-Root-Cause-Analysis-08.06.2024.pdf