Another CrowdStrike-like outage could collapse cashless societies

A

Alfonso Maruccia

Posts: 1,196   +345
Staff
No Cash All Pain?: Entire sectors of the global economy were disrupted by a single, botched PC security update, and it could easily happen again. This is why proponents of cash argue that we should never completely abandon non-digital money as a legitimate form of payment.

Security company CrowdStrike has caused disruptions to millions of Windows systems over the past few days, just months after similar issues affected Linux-based machines. The latest global IT outage led to significant disruptions across industries, particularly for businesses that rely heavily on digital and cashless payment systems.

The Payment Choice Alliance (PCA) argues that the CrowdStrike incident should serve as a warning against major changes in how money and payments are managed in modern society. The UK-based organization advocates for payment choice, noting that only three percent of adults in the UK have completely stopped using cash.

PCA President Ron Delnevo stated that outages are inevitable. However, if there are no alternatives to cards or digital apps, the entire economy could collapse. According to the banking organization UK Finance, cash payments have been increasing. The number of regular cash users fell from 23.1 million in 2021 to 21.6 million last year.

Cash continues to play a role in modern society, and most businesses still accept it. The GMB Union, a trade organization representing over 560,000 private and public entities in the United Kingdom, also emphasizes that cash is a vital component of community operations.

"When you take cash out of the system, people have nothing to fall back on, impacting on how they do the everyday basics," the organization said.

Cash is also essential for those seeking privacy and anonymity, according to PCA campaign director Martin Quinn. Thanks to cash, no Big Tech company or digital platform can collect or sell personal data. Banks, credit card companies, and online retailers do not have the right to know every detail of an individual's life, Quinn stated. Furthermore, cash remains the easiest payment method for some.

Permalink to story:

Another CrowdStrike-like outage could collapse cashless societies

 
Living in a hurricane-prone area, locals keep cash on hand and extra at the house for just those inevitable outages.

Cash or some type of equivalent is essential as a backup. This outage showed just how much farther we progressed from being able to do basic things. 15 years ago, the registers at a store going down wouldn't be a big deal. Get out some paper for receipts and take cash. Today, many shops were completely shut down.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Starfals
This outage is a huge embarrassment for everyone involved. If I was on the deployment end I'm not sure I could ever be talked into a no-review, no-limited-population-test, immediate deployment of updates that are effectively at the boot loader / kernel level or similar, and have no automated, remote, or even local user failsafe to rollback.

But even assuming the threat scenario is such that this inherently highly risky setup is justified, it would have to be supported by a level of QA and testing that is 100.000000000% bullet proof on the pushing party's side (CrowdStrike in this case, which clearly miserably failed to the tune of many many millions in economic harm done.)

Further, even if you had the bullet proof QA at time of push, someone needs to worry about the coordination of who else has push authority for other parts of the software stack. If CrowdStrike is absolutely sure their patch works on the current Windows version, and pushes it just as Microsoft pushes out a critical security patch change, who has tested the compatibility of the two together?
 
Does anyone really believe that this outage wasn’t caused by a cyberattack on CrowdStrike - which was almost certainly made possible by the hacking of MS earlier this year…

Backups are great - maybe do proper DIGITAL backups… of course, cash is always good to have for an emergency, but this sort of thing shouldn’t paralyze society.
 
  • Like
Reactions: godrilla
Squid Surprise said:
Does anyone really believe that this outage wasn’t caused by a cyberattack on CrowdStrike - which was almost certainly made possible by the hacking of MS earlier this year…
Click to expand...
I do, because a) CrowdStrike has accepted responsibility for this being their error, and b) if you were the sophisticated attacker who had this chance to install your malware on lots of critical systems, you goal would be something more significant and long-lasting than causing a temporary outage that is also certain to result in the removal of your malware.
 
brucek said:
I do, because a) CrowdStrike has accepted responsibility for this being their error, and b) if you were the sophisticated attacker who had this chance to install your malware on lots of critical systems, you goal would be something more significant and long-lasting than causing a temporary outage that is also certain to result in the removal of your malware.
Click to expand...
Unless you were state sponsored and this was your “shot across the bow” to warn the world (aka the US) that you can do this again any time…
And when MS was hacked by state sponsored hackers in November 2023… hmmm… connect the dots anyone?
By the way, isn’t CrowdStrike headed by the former VP of McAfee - who did a very similar thing (cause outages) years ago?
 
I never liked the over-dependence on tech to do even basic things.

All the money in the banks are just numbers nowadays, and these numbers are at the mercy of hackers.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Starfals
We have had holier than now hipster coffee shops in Australia ban cash. I hope those clowns were burned badly as they couldn't sell you a damn thing for a few days.
 
Cash is just as useless as digital as it's tied back to computer systems/databases at the point of sale, banks, and ultimately the Fed.

If an outage were to occur where it knocked all the systems offline, your money would useless unless a deposit were to be accepted. In today's world that would be the old mom and pop stores, everyone else would scan or enter a code into a computer system in order to make the transaction which would be affected.
 
Durch said:
Cash is just as useless as digital as it's tied back to computer systems/databases at the point of sale, banks, and ultimately the Fed.

If an outage were to occur where it knocked all the systems offline, your money would useless unless a deposit were to be accepted. In today's world that would be the old mom and pop stores, everyone else would scan or enter a code into a computer system in order to make the transaction which would be affected.
Click to expand...
Thank god there are a million little stores like that here. You can buy food, water and some other small things. Im in Europe, and 90% of the people in my country still use cash. I honestly dont like the idea of cards too. Yeah, there are big stores too, that need the register etc. We are slowly becoming like the US, and that sucks, for the obvious reasons shown this week all over the news.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

S
CrowdStrike also broke Debian and Rocky Linux earlier this year – hackers are taking advantage of Friday's chaos
Replies
5
Views
35
WhiteLeaff
WhiteLeaff
midian182
Businesses around the world hit by 'Blue Screen of Death' following faulty CrowdStrike update
Replies
12
Views
150
zamroni111
Z
Daniel Sims
The internet reacts to the CrowdStrike IT disaster that crashed computers worldwide
2
Replies
40
Views
288
seeprime
seeprime

Latest posts

Back