Take Action Now on NIS2 Directive

It’s time to ‘Have Your Say’ on the future of cybersecurity regulations in the European Union. The draft implementing regulation for the NIS2 Directive is now open for public feedback through the ‘Have Your Say’ portal until July 25, 2024. This consultation period allows stakeholders to contribute to refining the regulation, with all feedback shaping the final regulations.

CrowdStrike Windows Outage

Across the world, Windows computers have by effected the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). This appears to have been caused by an outage of services provided by cyber security provider, CrowdStrike, and has impacted a large number of organisations – from banks to airlines. According to recent announcements, “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on X.

Technical Fix for Global IT Outage - CrowdStrike and Microsoft Incident

Our team at Arctic Wolf has been following the CrowdStrike issue affecting Windows endpoints since approximately 12 AM EST on July 19th, 2024. Although Arctic Wolf’s service is not impacted, some of our customers who leverage CrowdStrike for endpoint security are experiencing widespread outages. Arctic Wolf continues to protect and monitor these customers’ environments while they focus their attention on recovering from this event.

Were Your Passwords Leaked in RockYou2024? Here's What To Do.

If your passwords were exposed in the RockYou2024 leak, you should immediately change them, set up Multi-Factor Authorization on your account and monitor your account for suspicious activity. RockYou2024 is now the largest password leak to date, with almost 10 billion passwords revealed on a popular hacking forum. Due to the magnitude of this leak, many people around the world are concerned for their online safety.

Two of Wallarm's Open-source Tools Have Been Accepted into Black Hat Arsenal 2024

We're gearing up with some seriously cool stuff for Black Hat! But first, a little sneak peek - not just one, but TWO of Wallarm's open-source tools will be featured in the Arsenal showcase at Black Hat USA this year. Black Hat Arsenal unites researchers and the open-source community to display their newest open-source tools and products, allowing presenters to engage directly with attendees. Its schedule is now live, so save the date to watch presentations of API Firewall and GoTestWAF.

One Faulty File: Global Disruption

As I write this, billions of users are looking at “the blue screen of death.” Flights are grounded around the world, 9-1-1 service is offline in the entire state of Alaska, hospitals can’t check in patients, retailers cannot make sales because their POS systems are down, Newark airport has reverted to paper tickets for check-in, and countless other organizations are at a standstill. This is the top story on every major news site I’ve checked. What could cause this carnage?

Microsoft Outage Due to CrowdStrike Update

Earlier today, CrowdStrike released a new update on their Falcon Sensor product. Unfortunately, the update caused technical issues, resulting in major outages globally to Microsoft Windows machines. The issue caused the “Blue Screen of Death” and several reports worldwide stated that several industries were affected, such as airlines, banks, media, etc. According to CrowdStrike Tech Alert, they are already aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the CrowdStrike Sensors.

A Brief History of Graduality

In the early hours of July 19th, 2024, CrowdStrike endpoints on Windows machines worldwide received a faulty content update, causing what is shaping up to be the one of the largest global IT outages to date. All over the world reports of Windows workstations and servers stuck in a boot loop with a BSOD were pouring in, impacting airlines, airports, banks, hospitals and many other critical infrastructures such as emergency services call centers, and the list goes on.

CrowdStrike & Rubrik Customer Content Update Recovery For Windows Hosts

Joint customers utilizing Rubrik for immutable backup are recommended to utilize Rubrik in-place recoveries for impacted Windows VMware Virtual Machines (VMs), standard VM restores for Azure VMs, AWS EC2 instances, and live mounts for Hyper-V and AHV VMs. For VMware VMs this significantly reduces the recovery time by only recovering the changed blocks required to revert the VM to a snapshot before the 04:09 UTC CrowdStrike host update.