This isn’t a gloat post. In fact, I was completely oblivious to this massive outage until I tried to check my bank balance and it wouldn’t log in.
Apparently Visa Paywave, banks, some TV networks, EFTPOS, etc. have gone down. Flights have had to be cancelled as some airlines systems have also gone down. Gas stations and public transport systems inoperable. As well as numerous Windows systems and Microsoft services affected. (At least according to one of my local MSMs.)
Seems insane to me that one company’s messed up update could cause so much global disruption and so many systems gone down :/ This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.
Very much so. But the vulnerabilities do not tend to be discovered (by developers) until an attack happens. And auto updates are generally how the spread of attacks are limited.
Open source can help slightly. Due to both good and bad actors unrelated to development seeing the code. So it is more common for alerts to hit before attacks. But far from a fix all.
But generally, time between discovery and fix is a worry for big corps. So why auto updates have been accepted with less manual intervention than was common in the past.
I would add that a lot of attacks are done after a fix has been released - ie compare the previous release with the patch and bingo - there’s the vulnerability.
But agree, patching should happen regularly, just with a few days delay after the supplier release it.