The coincidences inside IT historical crash

Sprinkling some conspiracy

Well, as most of you are aware, since I repeat myself occasionally, I try very hard to stick to quality, over quantity but reserve the right to publish different types of articles/e-mails. But also to increase the frequency if the necessity arises, not the case so far, but here this is a reminder of that. Also, the fog of “war” applies here.

In the rare case you live under Linux-based life or use Linux in your enterprise/workplace, or macOS, earlier today we the world suffered what is easily the biggest IT crash in history. You can grasp an idea of the extension by looking at the graph below.

From some random Twitter account

Ironically enough the culprit is also in the image. CrowStrike, a cyber-security company. In fact one of the largest, and biggest single points of failure, cybersec companies on the entire planet. So what happened ?

In simple words, CrowdStrike sent an automated update to all its clients, and its client list is absurdly large. Airports, hospitals, chain stores, banks, innumerable tech companies, automation companies, automotive companies, and other fields of modern human activity in many countries - odds are they may use CrowdStrike.

Their software acts very “deep” into any system that uses it, thus this faulty software update created a loop in any system or server using Windows. Until a few hours ago, this could only be fixed physically, by an IT tech or a knowledgeable person either the faulty archive. This event will billions of dollars in economic damage, and second and third-order effects none of us can predict.

If this was just a fuck up, that is fine, disastrous of course, but “fine”, but I will assume malice. And I messaged a few experts, and read a few hundred messages from InfoSec Twitter, and the sentiment was the same. If this was done maliciously by a threat actor, this leaves us with only two options, given the absurd level of sophistication to pull this off.

• Burning not one, but multiple Zero Days fails in software that no one is unaware of, and these 0Ds are not cheap now. Hundreds to millions of dollars. Each.

• Penetration Op. A highly skilled individual, recruited by a government, federal agency, or private firm to “penetrate” a company, and either execute espionage or act as a “break glass in case of emergency”. This is, obviously, a one-off. As expensive as 0Ds operations to pull off.

I just want to leave you with some food for conspiratorial thought.

Dmitri is a WEF alumni but also one of the co-founders of CrowdStrike. “Is that it ?” No. Dmitri also held a big position in McAfee.

Incidentally, and the largest irony of all, in 2010 McAffee sent an update that removed Windows system files and caused millions of computers and servers to crash and enter a loop. To add conspiracy to an already conspiratorial perspective. An unclassified transcript of the conversation referred to below.

The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.

If deeper meaning or maliciousness did indeed play a part in this, are they just running out of creativity ? Using the same playbook, over and over and over and over ? Sometimes it does feel like it. This also plays a smaller role in the larger dynamics I am currently researching. At least we now know what will happen if there is an cyber attack that takes most of the internet out.

Life goes on. People create and share memes. Besides some good information, the vast majority of social media traffic was… memes. To add as a future reference, Cyber Polygon, Klaus Schwab’s WEF brainchild will be returning this year. Until this year, the WEF played a central role in this “cyber resilience” exercise, and Klaus used to give keynote speeches, another here.

A week filled with historical events, we are not even close to October, and very little makes sense right now, with many other events that few are paying attention to. I guess we are in for a very wild ride. As a closing remark, I will leave (not my friend for plausible deniability) comment.

You can now also contemplate what the “AI safety” movement will bring forth to the world… just a small observation.

I am grateful for your support !