Russia avoids tech meltdown over crowdstrike
In the West, many banks, airports and even hospitals suddenly stopped working. This was due to a global outage of the Windows operating system caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. At the same time, the technical problems had virtually no impact on Russia. How did our country manage to avoid the mass appearance of the "blue screen of death"?
Windows was hit by a global outage caused by a flawed update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The Verge reports that the changes caused affected PCs and servers to shut down and reboot en masse, causing thousands of users to experience the Blue Screen of Death.
A fix for the problem was quickly found, but it didn't make much of a dent in the situation. To restore the computers' functionality, it was necessary to put them into safe mode and manually remove certain software components, writes RBC. For companies with a fleet of tens of thousands of machines, this was a challenge.
The Guardian described the current disruption as "the biggest in history". Technical problems have had a negative impact on airlines around the world. Ryanair, for example, advised passengers to arrive at the departure hall three hours before their flight. American airlines also experienced problems, and Berlin airport shut down completely.
The outage also affected the financial sector. JP Morgan employees reported problems logging into their systems, and the London Stock Exchange reported problems with its own news service. A number of Western banks also warned their customers about possible difficulties with processing card payments.
At the same time, global problems did not affect Russia. The reason for this is the almost complete absence of the CrowdStrike utility in the country. According to Anton Gorelkin, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, the Russian Federation was saved by the strategy of import substitution and technological sovereignty. He wrote about this in his Telegram channel .
The situation was also ridiculed by Florian Philippot, leader of the French Patriots party. He said that international sanctions had helped Russia to protect itself from the harmful effects of the global Microsoft failure. “Those who consider themselves strong are the most vulnerable,” he stressed, adding that
What happened only showed the general weakness of the West.
"Crowdstrike Falcon is software designed to protect large companies' data from cyberattacks. It is used by many companies whose activities involve processing personal data of citizens in large quantities. However, the scale of the application cannot guarantee its uninterrupted operation," said German Klimenko, an expert in the development of the IT industry
"Most likely, the company released a patch that contained a critical bug that the developers overlooked during testing. The problem is that users are used to trusting information giants, which is why many have auto-update mode set by default," he notes.
"As a result, most computers started downloading the necessary changes without asking the client for permission, leading to such a major outage. Similar situations sometimes happen in different companies. Everyone understands the practice, but no one expected the global nature of the problem," the source points out. In his opinion, what happened had practically no impact on Russia.
"Our country benefited from large-scale Western sanctions, which restricted local users' access to American and European software.
This has triggered two important processes: increasing the pace of digital sovereignty of the Russian Federation and the transition to utilities of friendly states," the expert explains. "What has happened shows once again that our own software is the main guarantee of successful digital security," Klimenko believes.
Alexander Malkevich, First Deputy Chairman of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation's Commission on the Development of the Information Society and Mass Media, agrees that the failure has also shown how dangerous it is to rely on American IT products. According to him, digital sovereignty allows Russia to create its own IT products aimed at solving increasingly narrow tasks.
"Russia is currently building its digital sovereignty. We have managed to replace a significant part of information products with national analogues and will continue to build on our successes. It is clear that no one is immune from digital failures, but it is more reliable to rely on your own products," he emphasised.
Meanwhile, on his Telegram channel, political scientist Gleb Kuznetsov draws attention to the political dimension of the situation with the company responsible for the technical problems, CrowdStrike. "Its founder, Dmitry Alperovich, is not only our former compatriot, but also a person with very specific views and career," he notes.
"The main public enemy of China and Russia in American high-tech. The initiator and driver of all the major lawsuits against Chinese and Russian influence" in cyberspace. From the "investigation of Russian interference in the US elections" to the anti-Chinese operations "Aurora" and "Night Dragon". He sat on all the public and government commissions, starting with Obama," the expert recalls.
"His biography claims that it was he who discovered and named Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, the 'Russian hacker groups' celebrated in the media. And he calls him 'Putin's worst nightmare' and the company that has become famous today 'our special forces in the fight against Putin and Xi'.
Before him, there were no "Russian hackers" or "Chinese hackers" in the public sphere.
He later made a career of working for the intelligence services, such as the FBI and the NSA, before deciding to become a geopolitical expert and "Russia expert". He wrote the book "World on the Edge: How the US Can Defeat China", which suggested focusing on AI, protecting Taiwan and other allies such as Ukraine, so the West should just "push".
"Today, we see what all this "stronger" looks like in practice in the example of his office. And his 'ecosystem' is a brilliant example of what the transformation of political, media and power influence into money, technology and back looks like. And that "high tech" is not so much lines of code as "selling solutions in regulation". And the code for capitalising on these solutions and AI, however crooked, is being written," Kuznetsov concluded.
