Elvis, Britney and Cher all found redemption in Las Vegas after going through a difficult period.
This week it was Crowdstrike’s turn.
The troubled cybersecurity company whose flawed software update brought much of the world to a standstill last month is currently enjoying a strange cultural standing at the annual Black Hat security conference, as hordes of visitors flock to its booth to snap selfies and stock up on company shirts and other freebies.
“My friend says I have to get one,” one person waiting in line at the Crowdstrike booth told Fortune, referring to the collectible figures the company was offering.
For many, the newfound familiarity of the Crowdstrike name is part of its appeal.
Frank Flanagan, a senior safety engineer at a large chain of convenience stores and gas stations on the West Coast, dressed in a colorful shirt and cowboy hat, said Assets he was just standing in line to get his hands on a figure.
“I hope it’s worth more in a year,” he chuckled, joking that the value would be even higher if the company went out of business due to legal issues resulting from the flawed software update.
Crowdstrike’s shares have fallen about 40 percent since the incident, which caused the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” to appear on computers running Microsoft Windows, causing thousands of flights to be canceled and systems to freeze at banks and hospitals around the world. Delta has blamed Crowdstrike alone for the canceled flights, which it says cost the company more than $500 million.
While many attendees at the Black Hat conference found the company’s publicity amusing, Assets Attendees at the event were convinced that Crowdstrike was a solid and reputable company despite the incident. One Crowdstrike customer, a security expert at a restaurant chain, said he was very pleased with the company’s response to the outage and that his company was quickly back up and running. Other attendees collectively shrugged at the idea that Crowdstrike could be blamed for a problem with a routine update that could happen to any of the security companies closely intertwined with Microsoft Windows.
Sharon Goldman
Steve Black, a professor of law and cybersecurity at Texas Tech University, pointed out that Delta’s argument against Crowdestrike is not a no-brainer. There is a significant legal question about how much responsibility a company bears for its own resilience, he said.
“The courts are divided on the nature of digital damages,” Black said. “Does a plaintiff have to show financial damages to win?” A legal battle will depend on how dependent Delta was on the systems affected by the update, what was in the service agreement with Crowdstrike and what Delta’s remedies were. “If I delay, I may be responsible for some of the losses,” he said.
An apology from the CEO and hot-pressed T-shirts
If the name Crowdstrike was all over the place at the Black Hat conference, it wasn’t just because of the news cycle. Ironically, Crowdstrike is one of the major sponsors of this year’s annual conference and occasionally draws a chuckle when its name is announced during panels and displayed on large billboards.
“The enemy is not stopping. Neither are we,” proclaims an oversized Crowdstrike advertisement above the interior walkway to the Mandalay Bay Hotel’s conference center. “Resilience starts with us. Our focus remains on you.”
George Kurtz, CEO of Crowdstrike, spoke during a panel at the event and apologized to the audience for the debacle, according to the Washington Post. “George’s comments were brief but well-crafted,” someone in the audience told the Post, noting that the comments were warmly received, “which surprised me considering how critical the security community can be.”
The Crowdstrike incident was a common topic during the opening panel discussion with Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Easterly said the widespread outage underscored the need for “cyber resilience” and careful testing and design by technology vendors.
Jerry Layden, CEO of CyberSaint, said Assets that there is a lot at stake when it comes to assigning blame for the outage because the scale of the economic impact is so great. His firm’s analysis estimated that the operational costs of the outage would reach $5 billion for Fortune 500 companies alone.
Layden believes Delta bears some of the blame for its losses. “They need to take responsibility for understanding their environment and recognizing where their biggest risks are,” he said, pointing out that most organizations consider attacks to be the biggest cyber risk, but bugs in software updates can also impact the entire business. “To put everything on Crowdstrike is not fair.”
Sharon Goldman
Others pointed out that Microsoft should take its share of blame for the outage, which many believe was caused by the design of Windows’ core architecture, which leads to malware, spyware and driver instability. “Microsoft should not be giving a third party this access,” said Eric O’Neill, a cybersecurity expert, lawyer and former FBI agent. “Microsoft will complain, well, that’s just the way the technology works or the licensing works, but that’s bullshit because this problem didn’t affect Linux or Mac. And Crowdstrike caught it super early.”
Back at the Crowdstrike booth, employees at the “T-shirt bar” were busy operating machines to produce custom-pressed shirts, while others handed out small boxes of the coveted figurines. The figurines, named “Aquatic Panda” and “Scattered Spider,” represent famous hacker groups and cybercriminals.
A security researcher in line said he didn’t know what the collectibles were, but had heard they were a sought-after item. On the other hand, as if not to raise expectations too high, the researcher added, “They’re probably nothing special.” After all, he said, “the company lost about 40% of its stock.”
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