Businesses and services around the world are slowly recovering after a massive IT outage affected computer systems for hours on Thursday and Friday.

Businesses, banks, hospitals and airlines were among the worst-hit after cyber-security firm Crowdstrike issued a faulty software update which affected Microsoft Windows.

Crowdstrike's CEO apologised for the disruption and said a fix had been issued, but admitted it could be "some time" before all systems were back up and running.

While some airline services are beginning to return to normal after thousands of flights were cancelled, operators expect some delays and cancellations to persist through the weekend.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg3m4jgdprxo

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Before a faulty software update dragged the company’s name into global headlines on Friday, Crowdstrike had a long history of involvement with US intelligence agencies, and played a key role in the ‘Russiagate’ hoax.

Crowdstrike released a defective update to its cloud-based security software on Friday that left an array of users around the world – including banks, airlines, media outlets, and government agencies – unable to use their IT systems. 

The company issued a fix within several hours of the problem being identified, but thousands of flights remained canceled or delayed into Friday afternoon, while hospitals, police departments, and businesses continued to report issues getting back online.

Trusted by governments

Founded by its CEO George Kurtz and former CTO Dmitri Alperovitch in 2011, Crowdstrike released its flagship Falcon platform two years later. Falcon monitors clients’ computers or servers for attacks, relays details of incoming threats to the company via a cloud-based monitoring service, and can then block or trace the attack.

Among the clients listed on Crowdstrike’s website are Amazon, Google, Visa, and Intel. More than 80% of US state governments use Crowdstrike, as do the national governments of Australia, Germany, Israel, and others.

The Falcon platform requires deep access to a client’s devices, meaning that a faulty update can crash not just the software, but the device itself, as happened on a global scale on Friday.

Working with spies

Less than a year after Crowdstrike was founded, Kurtz and Alperovitch brought on board former FBI Executive Assistant Director Shawn Henry to head up its cybersecurity consultation wing. By 2014, Henry’s department was issuing a flurry of hacking and espionage accusations against China, Russia, and North Korea, with information provided by Crowdstrike helping the US Justice Department issue indictments that summer against five Chinese military officers who allegedly hacked US energy corporations.

Russiagate

Crowdstrike was hired by the US Democratic National Committee to investigate the theft of data from its servers in 2016. Published by WikiLeaks, the data revealed that the DNC had rigged the Democratic primary against Bernie Sanders, and that Hillary Clinton had effectively paid to control the committee.

Crowdstrike concluded that Russia was behind the breach, with Henry testifying to Congress that the company “saw activity that we believed was consistent with activity we’d seen previously and had associated with the Russian government.”

Henry’s assessment bolstered the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, in which US spy agencies determined that Russia “exfiltrated large volumes of data from the DNC.” This document in turn was used to justify Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

However, the full transcript of Henry’s testimony was not declassified until 2020. In the complete transcript, Henry told lawmakers that his company had “no evidence that [any files] were actually exfiltrated” from the DNC’s servers, and that there was only “circumstantial evidence” and “indicators that that data was exfiltrated.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange suggested [HE DID NOT*] in 2016 that a DNC staffer named Seth Rich – who died in suspicious circumstances after the apparent breach – was the source of the leak. Former NSA official and whistleblower William Binney argued in 2017 that all available evidence pointed to the leak being the work of a disgruntled DNC insider.

https://www.rt.com/news/601364-crowdstrike-security-outage-russiagate/

*JULIAN ASSANGE NEVER REVEALED THE SOURCE OF HIS INFORMATION...

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The USA, which developed all possible technologies that resulted in GNU/Linux, is also in the hands of Microsoft. How is such a thing possible?

Microsoft’s most recent failure has brought to light, once again, the difference between computer security in the liberal world and that of former communist countries. Countries that depended on Windows had troubles; countries that had their own operating system based on GNU/Linux had no troubles. Those who know the history of operating systems will not fail to smile at this irony; after all, “Linux” is an American invention that helps the sovereignty of strong national states.

This is not so obvious because, if you Google “Linux”, you will discover that it is the invention of Finn citizen of Swedish ethnicity, called Linus Torvalds, who spent most of his life in Finland and invented the kernel Linux there, in 1991. But it turns out that what is commonly known as Linux is, in fact, an operating system based on GNU, which a collective creation led by the almost anarchist programmer Richard Stallman, an ethnic Jew from New York.

Let’s see: when someone says “So-and-So uses Linux”, they never mean that So-and-So uses a cell phone with the Android operating system. However, this is true because Android is an operating system that uses the Linux kernel. Every operating system needs a kernel that links software to hardware. What Linus Torvalds invented was a kernel, not a complete operating system. And in the U.S., Stallman and his partners managed to make an almost complete operating system, lacking only the core.

When Stallman was young, IBM, a private company, made the hardware and software. This means that the system code was a trade secret and an intellectual property. What Stallman wanted was to do reverse engineering in order to create free software, that is, software that could never be secret or patented. This was especially important and attractive to students, but it has its obvious security implications: how do you use a closed-source computer that is updated remotely by the software owner?

At the time, there were a lot of private operating systems. Stallman hated IBM’s language and chose the Unix system, which used the C language, as he considered it the most convenient. Unix was originally created for the Bell System, the telecommunications company founded by Graham Bell.

Thus, Stallman founded the GNU Project in 1983 with the aim of creating free software. GNU stands for “GNU is Not Unix”, and has a gnu as a symbol. In 1991, Linus Torvalds submitted his kernel to the GNU license, which allows anyone to study, alter and use it as they wish, and the GNU operating system was ready to be installed on computers as an alternative to corporate operating systems. But since anyone can use it, Google uses it. That’s why Android and ChromeBook have Linux in their operating systems. The Chrome browser, so widely used, is freely developed: Google has a free browser called Chromium, anyone can study the code and improve it, and then Google takes the freely developed code and then closes it — hence the Chrome, which is proprietary software. Anyone who wants can download Chromium and test it.

Well: because it is free software, GNU allows programmers around the world to create operating systems based on it. Not every GNU needs to be Linux; after all, since 1991, other free kernels have been created. It is worth highlighting BSD, developed by the University of Berkeley, which is like a parallel GNU: it also used the C language and was based on Unix. Soon after Torvalds created the Linux kernel, the people at Berkeley open sourced them. Therefore, it is possible to use the FreeBSD kernel in some GNU operating systems made for Linux, such as Debian: there you have a free system. However, as GNU can be used by anyone, Apple even created a GNU that uses the Darwin core, which is theirs.

And among the many creations of operating systems, there are a series of state-owned ones, of which I highlight Red Star OS, from North Korea, Astra Linux, from Russia, Kylin, from China and Maya OS from India. Of the BRICS, Brazil and South Africa are the countries that have their public administration and large companies at the mercy of Microsoft.

But this is not an evil linked to poverty. On the contrary: the USA, which developed all possible technologies that resulted in GNU/Linux, is also in the hands of Microsoft. How is such a thing possible?

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/07/23/having-invented-so-many-technologies-how-can-us-still-use-windows/

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