TOTAL SHUTDOWN: CrowdStrike Failure Grounds 1,000s of Flights
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Boy, CrowdStrike, Reality Check, and the return of the blue screen of death. So I am up bright and early this morning, only operating in a few hours sleep. Thanks for the, thanks Donald Trump for the extra long speech, by the way. Anyway, neither here nor there. I get wind of what’s happening around the globe and this global IT outage, grounding flights, dealing with banks, all sorts of issues.
again, with Microsoft Windows devices. The blue screen of death is one of the reasons why I left Microsoft computers years ago and we do everything on Apple’s platform. However, neither here, let’s put that aside. This wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when. I want to go back in time. I remember when General Motors was
pushing out. can’t remember the exact year it was. I think it was going back like 2007, maybe 2006, 2007 when it was all the rage, their OnStar device. Hello OnStar, you press that little button. Yeah, that thing made me nervous. Made me nervous because the reality was is that you figured out that the people at OnStar could shut your car off if they wanted to.
They had to press a button and basically disable your car. And again, found that a bit troubling being my libertarian bent, if you will, and not having much trust in the government. I again, back then I didn’t have much trust in the government. Today, forget about it. Zero. Anyway, neither here nor there. I’ve warned about this over the years and how
We’ve got this grand desire. It’s this problem. were, you know, like stupid sheep. The country goes in, businesses go in. They all go as hard as they can, stampeding in one direction off a cliff without, you know, taking a deep breath and saying, wait a second, is this really a good idea? Is this really a good idea to put all of these systems that we rely on on the internet that people can get in remotely?
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Again, is it a good idea to put the water supply, electricity, a myriad of things, okay, that we rely on? Do you think it’s smart to have them online? Now, again, let’s think it through. If you were designing a city, let’s say, we’ll go back to the Middle Ages. We’ll go back to the Middle Ages, we’ll go even prior to that. It doesn’t matter. I’ll give you an example, okay?
The last fully walled in city, it’s unbelievable spot. It’s in Rhodes, Greece. mean, unbelievable place. Walled in city has a motor around it. You know, the entrances there and the bridges you had to take. They were basically protecting from invaders from getting in on things like water supply, electricity, airlines, whatever it may be.
Wouldn’t it be smart if you’re trying to protect those systems to make sure that no one could get in from the outside? Wouldn’t it better be better, much better to have an intranet? Now, I tell you what we did. We used to use this god awful, I hated it, contact manager software, but it only ran on Windows.
And I had it up with the blue screen of death. had it, but again, I didn’t want to convert at the time. We hadn’t figured it out yet. So I actually, you know, had a separate system set up where the contact management software was separate from all of our banking stuff, because I didn’t want them to touch. I wanted to have an essence of protection and internet around things. So no one could get in. No one could mess with anything.
we don’t have that now. We don’t have that now and we need it. And you know, what’s fascinating too is people do this to themselves in their own homes, which quite frankly, I don’t understand. They have all of the, you know, the new appliances for your home, example, have refrigerator that are online and you got the commercials out there. you could have your refrigerator telling you when, you need certain groceries, why do you need that? Why do you need
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or your stove and you can tell it to preheat the oven from your phone or your thermostat. Why? Built in my house in Florida and the electronics guy is doing all of our wiring and internet and all that stuff. He’s like, well, you know, if you want to have a smart home and you want to be able to control the lights and do all that stuff. I’m like, no, completely not necessary. Nope. I don’t want anybody from the outside being able to get into my fridge.
mess with my thermostat or anything. Okay, well, okay, some hacker wants to shut down my buddy Sonos Entertainment System. Who cares? Okay. People messing around with my fridge, messing around with my thermostat. I don’t want that. I don’t want that. We do these silly, silly things to ourselves all the time without thinking down the road how this could affect stuff.
Very simple. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me that the airlines couldn’t have a separate system where they’re just communicating within themselves, not allowing outside, not allowing the internet in. They have an intranet. It’d be a hell of a lot safer. Now, again, they’re not even saying this was a hack. I an interview this morning with the CEO of CrowdStrike. It was a bug
The software, a bug, a bug is what you’re saying, a bugs, bug. Okay, okay, and their stock is getting pummeled right now and rightfully so. But again, I don’t know, I don’t know if this will be a wake up call. I have friend that is accent works in cloud services for obviously a Microsoft competitor works
Google and I told him because we were talking about this. I said, you know, this is what you guys need to do. And they said, yeah, we’re starting to think that way and develop it as well. This is the way to go. This is way to go. It’s not like hardware and equipment are that expensive. They really aren’t. If you have to have a side by side system, to me, it would be a selling point. OK, I don’t want anybody from the outside, even the ability to get into things that are
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That to me would be a surefire way. They talk about hackers all the time. Again, and there’s a whole industry around it, and rightfully so. You gotta protect against hackers. You know how you make something unhackable? Well, again, you make it unhackable. Can’t get in. Watchdog on wallstreet .com.
