The “blue screen of death” that appeared last week on an estimated 8.5 million PCs and servers around the world running Microsoft software wasn’t a hack or an attack. No, “the largest digital outage in history,” one that affected industries ranging from aviation to coffee shops, was the product of good cyber hygiene — an automatic software update with bad code.
That good behavior could produce catastrophic results is a warning that there is something fundamentally wrong — something systemic — with our socioeconomic infrastructure. Last week’s outage is another reminder of the perverse incentives built into our information technology systems and our failure, yet again, to understand, value and price resilience in our economic behavior. As Harvard professor Joseph Nye famously warned, “security is like oxygen. You don’t appreciate it ‘til it’s gone.”
CrowdStrike is one of the world’s premier cybersecurity firms. With over 29,000 customers, it describes itself as having “reinvented cybersecurity for the cloud era and transformed the way cybersecurity is delivered and experienced by customers.” CEO George Kurtz is one of the highest paid executives in the world, taking home more than $230 million in compensation over the last three years.