At Least 750 US Hospitals Faced Disruptions During Last Year’s CrowdStrike Outage, Study Finds
When, a year ago today, a buggy update of software sold by the Cybersecurity Company Crowstrike shot millions of computers worldwide and sent them to a death spiral of repeated restarts, the global cost of all these crushed machines was equivalent to one of the worst cyberattacks in history. Some of the various estimates of the total damage worldwide have extended billions of dollars.
Now, a new study by a team of medical cybersecurity researchers took the first steps to quantify the cost of Crowdstrike disaster not in dollars, but in potential damage to hospitals and their patients in the United States. It reveals evidence that hundreds of services from these hospitals have been disrupted during breakdown and raise concerns about potentially serious effects for the health and well-being of patients.
Researchers from the University of California in San Diego have marked the anniversary of the Crowdsstrike disaster today by publishing an article in Jama Network Open, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association Network, which for the first time tries to create an approximate estimate of July 19, as well as services on these networks on these networks on these networks on these networks on these networks on these networks on these networks.
By digitizing parts exposed to the Internet of hospital networks before, during and after the crisis, they detected that at least 759 hospitals in the United States seem to have experienced a disruption of the network that day. They found that more than 200 of these hospitals seemed to have been struck specifically with breakdowns that directly affected patients, inaccessible health records and test analyzes to fetal surveillance systems that have been offline. Of the 2,232 hospital networks they were able to scan, the researchers detected that 34% of them seem to have suffered from a certain type of disturbance.
All this indicates that the Crowdsstrike breakdown could have been an “important public health problem”, maintains Christian Dameff, an emergency medical doctor of the UCSD and cybersecurity researcher, and one of the authors of the article. “If we had the data of this document a year ago when it happened,” he adds, “I think we would have been much more concerned with the impact that it really had on American health care.”
Crowdsstrike, in a declaration to Wired, strongly criticized the study of the UCSD and Jama’s decision to publish it, calling the newspaper “undesirable science”. They note that the researchers did not verify that the disturbed networks run Windows or Crowdstrike software and stress that the Cloud service of Microsoft Azure experienced a major breakdown on the same day, which could have been responsible for some of the disruption of the hospital network. “Timer conclusions on downtime and the impact of patients without verifying the results with one of the hospitals mentioned is completely irresponsible and scientifically indefensible,” said the declaration.
“Although we reject the methodology and the conclusions of this report, we recognize the impact of the incident a year ago,” added the press release. “As we have said from the start, we sincerely apologize to our customers and people affected and continue to focus on strengthening the resilience of our platform and industry.”
