Multi-Billion $ Global IT Outage Could Have Been Avoided With This European Startup Tech! ??

The recent CrowdStrike fiasco led to the LARGEST IT outage in history ─and it exposed the often ignored GIGANTIC iceberg below the sea when it comes to vulnerabilities in traditional memory management.

On July 19, 2024, a faulty update from CrowdStrike caused 8.5 million Windows computers to crash, resulting in widespread disruptions across critical sectors like healthcare, finance, and air travel.

How?

And what if this could have been avoided?

What happened: The incident began when CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems. This update was part of their routine operations to enhance the Falcon platform's protection mechanisms. However, this particular update triggered a logic error, resulting in a system crash and the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on impacted systems.

The root cause was a null pointer dereference in the C++ code.

I spent most of my computer scientist career working in C++ and to translate the jargon to human English:

The update created a pointer variable, which is a basically a programming "placeholder sign" intended to reference specific memory data. Due to a coding error, the pointer remained NULL. Without the necessary null check, the code attempted to access memory at an invalid address, causing Windows to crash the program as a protective measure.

The fallout was massive.

Critical services like hospitals, airlines, and financial institutions were severely affected. The outage disrupted operations globally, causing flight cancellations, delays in medical procedures, and interruptions in emergency services. The estimated cost of this outage exceeded $1 billion and is probably in the TENS OF BILLIONS.

A year ago, no one could predict this very incident would happen. But here is what anyone in the industry should have known: both Microsoft and Google estimate?that 70% of vulnerabilities?in their products are due to memory safety issues.

Given that?Cybercrime was estimated to have cost the global economy nearly?$1 trillion in 2020 and grows every year, we can roughly estimate that memory issues alone could be responsible for approximately?$700 billion?in damages annually.

Every year.

And so last year, knowing that something like this incident happens on smaller (and yet still huge scale) every year, and something even bigger was bound to happen, I invested in startup whose founder and CTO developed an ENTIRELY new approach to memory management.

Their tech would have avoided this incident AND, due to how memory management safety affects speed in higher-level languages that want to prevent issues like this one, also offers several multiples of increased processing speed and efficiency too.

VyperCore is that startup. A European deeptech startup. And they offer a novel solution that could have prevented this disaster thanks to their in-silicon approach that gives their cusatomers:

- Robust memory safety at the gate level

- Up to 10x performance acceleration

- No need for source code changes

Why?

VyperCore's technology moves memory allocation management functions out of the software runtime and into the silicon hardware. This approach redefines the processor's memory view, using discrete memory objects with bounded sizes. By implementing garbage collection and memory safety checks directly in hardware, VyperCore eliminates vulnerabilities like buffer overflows and use-after-free errors.

In the case of the CrowdStrike incident, VyperCore's hardware-based memory safety would have prevented the null pointer dereference from causing a system crash.

The hardware would have detected the invalid memory access attempt and blocked it, ensuring the system remained stable.

So there you have it.

I think I posted about a US VC celebrity saying Europe can be forgotten about in tech.

I think he is wrong.

(Or trying to buy cheap startup shares at a discount)

European founders, like the duo sperheading Vypercore, Russell Haggar and Ed Nutting are solving trillion dollar problems that not even US giants can handle.

That's the power of European startups in Deeptech and what makes me and Silicon Roundabout Ventures so excited about backing then right out of their home garage (true story!) or Uni lab.

Specifically around computing, we are hungry to back novel approaches to challenge the status quo on semiconductor, hardware and hybrid approaches that no one has tried before. From optical computing and quantum technologies to new architectures and fabless approaches, we are about to see a new Silicon Valley boom that won't just be in California but all over the world.

#venturecapital #deeptech #semiconductor #cybersecurity #datacenters