Story of the Year: global IT outages and supply chain attacks

A faulty update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered one of the largest IT outages in history, impacting approximately 8.5 million systems worldwide. This incident serves as a stark reminder of the critical risks posed by global IT disruptions and supply chain weaknesses. With large-scale security crises being one of the most relevant threats worldwide, it’s more important than ever to reflect on past events, assess emerging threats, and, most crucially, explore strategies to prevent future incidents. As part of Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2024, our “Story of the Year” centers on these pressing issues. We’ll begin by revisiting notable supply chain incidents from 2024, and then explore potential scenarios of more damaging cases and the ways we prepare for them. Let’s dive in. Overview of 2024’s supply chain disruptions

CrowdStrike Linux outage

What happened. Just weeks before the Windows incident, CrowdStrike encountered issues with Linux. A software update in April caused problems in a number of distributions, such as Red Hat, Debian and Rocky. Why does it matter.