- Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the massive IT outage earlier this month that stranded thousands of customers will cost it $500 million.
- The airline canceled more than 4,000 flights in the wake of the outage, which was caused by a botched CrowdStrike software update and took thousands of Microsoft systems around the world offline.
- Bastian, speaking from Paris, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that the carrier would seek damages from the disruptions, adding, “We have no choice.”
The stories I could tell about how companies will hire a team to run tests on their digital and physical systems while also limiting access to outside nodes disconnected or screened from their core, primary, IMPORTANT systems.
Kicker is that plenty of people who work for these companies get it. Very rarely does someone in a position to do something about it actually understand. A few thousand dollars and they could have hired a hat or two to run penetration on systems and fixed the vulnerabilities, or at least shored them up so this fucking 000 bug didn’t impact them so harshly.
But naaaaaaah. Gotta cut payroll, brb.
I’m not sure any kind of pentest would prevent crowdstrikes backdoor access to release updates at its own discretion and cadence. The only way to avoid that would be blocking crowdstrike from accessing the Internet but I’d bet they’d 100% brick the host over letting that happen. If anything this is a good lesson in not installing malware to prevent even worse malware. You handed the keys to your security to a party that clearly doesn’t care and paid the price. My reaction to that legal disclaimer of crowdstrikes stating they take no responsibility for anything they do… responsibility is the only reason anyone would buy anything from them (aside from being forced by legal requirements that clearly didn’t have anyone who understood them involved in the legislation).
Bah… you’re right. I’ve just become so disillusioned by the smoke and mirrors. So many critical systems protected by poorly managed file mazes and a prayer that Susan in accounting doesn’t get anything higher than the digital equivalent of a toddler slamming its face onto a keyboard several times email from bos$6&776ggjskbigman@poorlyspelledcompany.bendover because some 13 year old with computer access got clever.
I’m a bit agitated atm, sorry about that.
I know it seems shocking but some companies do and did plan for backup systems in the event their entire windows platform blue screened. Thats why there were some companies that had a hard time with it and some that didnt.
The original poster is correct that Delta should shoulder some of the blame. The outage caused a problem but it was Deltas response that caused 500 million in damages. I’m sure that CrowdPoint didn’t advise Delta to put all their eggs in one basket did they?
Yeah, I agree. My whole comment was basically crowdstrike is liable but companies should reflect and take some accountability for their overreliance on CS.