this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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https://web.archive.org/web/20240719155854/https://www.wired.com/story/crowdstrike-outage-update-windows/

"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.'"

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 3 months ago (2 children)

How did the update get through testing, if the bug has an immediately obvious catastrophic effect?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Something I have heard (take with a grain of salt) is that there was a new windows update that went out just before the crowdstrike update. And the issue happened with the new windows update.

[–] EncryptKeeper 7 points 3 months ago

Not the case. I have dozens of servers last updated in May that crashed.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Pretty good test to see how easy it would be to shut the world down. Uninstall CrowdStrike.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I'm sure Russia is taking note. Its computers were unaffected due to having no Crowdstrike installations. China too, apparently.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

China and Russia are switching to Linux, too.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago

Read-only friday, right? Right...?
Poor sysadmins.

[–] MeekerThanBeaker 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And this happens the same week that Kaspersky left the U.S.

They are laughing internally right now.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MeekerThanBeaker 1 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] paraphrand 1 points 3 months ago

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.