U.S. Highlights Software Supply Chain Vulnerabilities Following CrowdStrike Outage

In light of the CrowdStrike software disaster on July 19, the White House and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) have expressed concerns regarding the robustness of the software supply chain and memory safety issues.

According to a report released by the GAO on July 30, the CrowdStrike incident, which resulted in the interruption of 8.5 million Microsoft Windows computers, brought back issues that were brought up during the state-linked supply chain attack against SolarWinds in 2020.

The White House stated on August 1 that the CrowdStrike event emphasizes particular cautions on memory safety issues in software development, according to CybersecurityDive.com. The statements expand on a report published in February by the Office of the National Cyber Director, which questioned the relationship between software vulnerabilities and memory safety problems.

Certain programming languages have a feature called memory safety that protects programmers from creating specific kinds of memory-related errors.