How One Bad CrowdStrike Update Crashed the World’s Computers
How One Bad CrowdStrike Update Crashed the World’s Computers
A defective CrowdStrike kernel driver sent computers around the globe into a reboot death spiral, taking down air travel, hospitals, banks, and more with it. Here’s how that’s possible.
"CrowdStrike is far from the only security firm to trigger Windows crashes with a driver update. Updates to Kaspersky and even Windows’ own built-in antivirus software Windows Defender have caused similar Blue Screen of Death crashes in years past."
"'People may now demand changes in this operating model,' says Jake Williams, vice president of research and development at the cybersecurity consultancy Hunter Strategy. 'For better or worse, CrowdStrike has just shown why pushing updates without IT intervention is unsustainable.'"
How did the update get through testing, if the bug has an immediately obvious catastrophic effect?
Agreed, this seems like a pretty obvious failed smoke test.
Three options seem likely to me: the build was untested, the final package got corrupted after testing, the test environment has some kind of abberant config that hid the defect.
Kernel drivers are "reviewed" and signed by Microsoft for exactly this reason. It's a security risk if any program an administrator runs could load malicious kernel drivers into windows
Pretty good test to see how easy it would be to shut the world down. Uninstall CrowdStrike.
I'm sure Russia is taking note. Its computers were unaffected due to having no Crowdstrike installations. China too, apparently.
I’m sure they have their own solution for that, but yes, it would be unwise for a government to install software maintained by a foreign country. Kind of like voting booths.
China and Russia are switching to Linux, too.
Read-only friday, right? Right...?
Poor sysadmins.Every time our IT tells PC users to just leave their computer on for X hours so it gets updates, I wonder how that can be a great system.
And this happens the same week that Kaspersky left the U.S.
They are laughing internally right now.
Kaspersky has caused BSODs because of updates in the past as well. Hardly an AV maker hasn't. The problem here is that Crowd Strike has captured the enterprise market in a large portion of the globe.
Oh I'm well aware. I hated deploying Kaspersky. But we switched to Crowdstrike last year and now this happened. Just a funny coincidence.
Luckily, we're a small company and a third use Macs. The others, well, I had three PC laptop and one virtual server issues. Not too bad. We're on the West Coast so glad I was aware of it last night when Australia got issues.