What the Blue Screen of Death that froze the world taught us
bit.ly/3YcLNV7) by Samuel Arbesman reminded me of a joke he has there: “A software engineer walks into a bar. He orders a beer. Orders zero beers.
Orders 99,999,999,999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers.
Orders a ueicbksjdhd. The bar is still standing. A real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is.
The bar bursts into flames." For us non-software types, it basically means that for every piece of software, you need to stress-test it by flinging a variety of inputs at it that may induce errors. However, often, it is what’s not anticipated or thought about that causes the system to crash. So, the best way to make a system break-proof is to try and break it through any means possible and then fix the gaps.
Netflix made this approach popular with Chaos Monkey, an internal software that would randomly attack systems and sub-systems to check how its infrastructure behaved. It helped engineer a robust system to serve movies on demand. Global cybersecurity major CrowdStrike seems not to have learnt from this.
On 19 July, a blast from the past, the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), reappeared across computer screens, disrupting airports, hospitals and businesses worldwide. The culprit? A patch from CrowdStrike of its Falcon software update that contained a glitch, causing Windows systems globally to crash and exposing the fragility of our interconnected digital world. This faulty update contained an error that caused a major malfunction in the core of the Windows operating system (known as the ‘kernel’).
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