In 2020, CrowdStrike’s Australian president warned the government against relying too much on critical technology providers who couldn’t be trusted. Except he was raising the alarm about “foreign adversaries”, as opposed to companies such as his own, which accidentally triggered one of the world’s largest tech disasters.
On Friday, millions of Windows computers across the world were rendered useless thanks to a faulty update to CrowdStrike, an exceedingly popular enterprise cybersecurity software.
The update, installed silently in the background of computers, brought banks, airports, supermarkets, broadcasters and other industries to their knees by trapping both PCs and the servers behind many services in an endless restarting loop.
The error lay specifically in an updated file relating to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor, one of the company’s products that monitors to see if any software is trying to do something nefarious to a device.
Carrying out this function requires access to the most critical part of a computer’s operation — which is why a borked update was able to incapacitate computers in a way that few other pieces of software could.
At the centre of all of this is CrowdStrike’s president, Australian Mike Sentonas. According to his LinkedIn, Sentonas studied at WA’s Edith Cowan University before taking his first job as a programmer and analyst at the WA Ministry of Justice. After a stint working at Woodside Energy — practically a requirement for any Sandgroper — Sentonas would go on to work at Network Associates, which produced the popular McAfee anti-virus software, before it was bought out by Intel. He rose to become Intel Security’s VP, chief technology officer, before joining CrowdStrike as its vice president.
Sentonas has given his signature to a number of submissions made by CrowdStrike to the Australian federal government about technology policy.
In a 2020 response to the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Cyber and Critical Technology International Engagement Strategy (CCTIES), Sentonas stressed the need to take steps to avoid technological dependencies — except his focus was on “potentially adversarial nations; those with a well-established track record of being a bad actor in cyberspace; and those with predatory technology policies domestically or abroad”.
Sentonas advocated for depending on “commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions where possible, including from international providers that are able to establish trust.” (No points for guessing who he means there).
His warning about technological dependency takes on a new meaning in light of the chaos caused by the CrowdStrike fault, which has prompted questions about whether centralisation within the tech industry presents a security risk — even from CrowdStrike itself.
“Their IT stack may include just a single provider for operating system, cloud, productivity, email, chat, collaboration, video conferencing, browser, identity, generative AI and increasingly security as well,” a CrowdStrike vice-president Drew Bagley said. “This means that the building materials, the supply chain and even the building inspector are all the same.”
It’s almost certainly not been a good weekend for Sentonas, but Crikey has found something that might cheer him up: the Victorian government lists $238.52 in unclaimed money for a Mr Michael Sentonas.
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