Anyone who had to live through the chaos of air travel on July 19, 2024, will likely not forget it. As soon as I arrived at Milwaukee Airport around 4 am, I knew something was up. There were plenty of ticket agents at the counter, but they seemed overwhelmed. After about 15 minutes of huddling, one of them heroically stood on the counter and waived several legacy baggage forms, and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to manually check you in.”
What happened exactly?
Somehow a routine software update from Crowdstrike’s Falcon Artificial Intelligence Enabled Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platform, collided with the Microsoft Windows Platforms they were supposed to be protecting and caused an endless re-boot cycle.
This made the Windows-based systems necessary for airlines, banks, and hospitals, inoperable. The dystopian Zombieville of O’Hare Airport in Chicago was surreal, all the large screen monitors showed a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD). Having worked the analysis of several large cyber breaches over the years, I’ve never seen a mundane software update cause the networks to vomit and wretch so violently unless that was the intended outcome.
How could one of the premier cybersecurity firms grievously injure the flock they were sworn to protect?
The lights turn on and there are Kurtz and Alperovitch (again)
One can never be too honest, but I was shocked that morning to find that the Chief Executive Officer of Crowdstrike, George Kurtz was fully accepting responsibility. It normally takes weeks and months to establish precise forensics on cyber event-causal factors. The time of the worldwide push that freaked out the Windows environments was 04:09 Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) or 00:09 Eastern Standard Time).
So somehow, within about six hours, George Kurtz had been able to collect data, analyze, come to the precise conclusion that it was Crowdstrike’s fault, and received Corporate Counsel review and approval that Crowdstrike should accept full responsibility.
Incredible staff work under pressure?
Honesty is a rare virtue in today’s world, but within six hours, Kurtz went public with definitive statements that might kill Crowdstrike? Amazing in several ways. The name Kurtz was familiar, and finally, it dawned on me.
Kurtz was one of the key personalities in 2010 when McAfee, once a giant in Cybersecurity, created one of the largest glitches in cyber up to that time with an update that shut down Windows XP.
Who else was at McAfee at the time? Dmitri Alperovitch, the Vice President of Threat Research who exposed China’s early cyber thefts via the seminal “Shady Rat” report. The 2010 Cyber Oopsie almost forced McAfee out of business until the cadaver was bought by Intel Corporation.
Was the 2010 McAfee gaffe, payback for the dirt Dmitri was finding? Unclear, but McAfee is now the Kodak Carousel or Sears Roebuck of Cyber. Like Fauci and pandemics, you apparently can’t have a cyber disaster without Kurtz and Alperovitch.
A missed line of code?
Crowdsourced forensics on the Crowdstrike update showed an errant line of code as the culprit. “Since the program was trying to access memory it wasn’t supposed to, Windows recognized this as a potential security threat. To protect the system, Windows crashed the program entirely, resulting in the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) and the outage,” wrote Rahuj Raj, further amplifying Zach Vorhies, Google Whistleblower. Multiple violations of best practices are showing themselves.
Crowdsourcing of software is, in many ways, independent 3rd party verification and validation. Why wasn’t Crowdstrike doing this before a software update push? A pair of human eyes caught this quickly, which is good, but why wasn’t the Falcon AI platform using AI in addition to humans to red team the code before a push? Why wasn’t there execution of the code in a “detonation chamber” before a push to test real result?
The technical aspect is important, but personalities and policies are 90% of the issue in cybersecurity affairs. In cyber, the rule should be two strikes and you are out. Kurtz and Alperovitch now have two strikes.
Crowdstrike was part of the mess with the “DNC Hack” lie. Former FBI Senior Official Shawn Henry, who retired and then became the President of Crowdstrike Services, said about the DNC emails, “There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There’s circumstantial evidence”. Circumstantial appears to mean feeling or emotion in this context.
In October 2016 I was at an event where Henry said emphatically that Trump was a Russian asset. At the time Henry gave the 2017 testimony to Adam Schiff, did he know, or was he influenced by Charles McGonigal, former Director of Counterintelligence for the FBI New York Field Office, now in prison for taking money from the Russians at that exact time in 2016 and 2017?
The last 90 days have had too many coincidences
The litany of coincidences over the last 90 days is staggering. An attempted assassination attempt, First Lady Jill consuming Secret Service resources in a sudden, simultaneous event in Pittsburgh, a photographer from the New York Times right in front of Trump with his camera at an extremely unusual setting (did he know something was going to happen?), major networks that had not covered Trump Rallies for some time suddenly being present at the same Trump Rally, shock at Biden’s cognitive state by those who conducted a RICO Act cover-up of his cognitive state, Biden being forced out, Harris taking over, and likely the largest cyber disruption in history.
I’ve been asked numerous times, was the Crowdstrike event a harbinger of larger events? I’d say it was the event, it was smoke, chaff, and flares to distract from the unseating of Biden without invoking the 25th Amendment to fully remove Biden.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a full-blown Deep State coup in motion to keep Donald J. Trump from returning.
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