Crowdstrike, Cybersecurity and Technology’s Big House of Cards

For the last 24 hours, companies around the world have been reporting problems that are hampering their operations caused by a bad update to the Crowdstrike security application, which has hit Windows 365.

Crowdstrike Falcon blocks attacks on the system while recording all activity. CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company that strongly criticized Microsoft for the series of attacks launched against the company recently, prompting the company to launch a product designed to work with Microsoft’s Defender antivirus tool, which has been installed by large companies around the world.

The app’s tagline, which was particularly critical of Microsoft, read “Cyber risks that start with Microsoft… end with CrowdStrike”. Microsoft responded by saying “security is a team sport”, but could do nothing to prevent many of its customers, amid a climate of intense questioning of the security of its platform, from installing Crowdstrike applications to try to protect themselves.

Now, in what appears to be case of business karma, Crowdstrike’s latest update has made it impossible to boot Windows, instead launching the dreaded BSOD Blue (or Black if you used Windows 11 Screen of Death, which makes Crowdstrike the cause of a problem that right now affects companies of all kinds, from airport managers to the media, including electricity distributors, banks, hospitals, etc.

Apparently, the solution to the problem is to boot affected machines in safe mode, access the system directory in which the Crowdstrike application is located (usually C:\Windows\System32\drivers\Crowdstrike), locate the files whose name matches “C-00000291*.sys”, delete them and boot back normally. This disables the update, and while it could cause security issues later, it allows the affected machine to be rebooted and activity maintained. But in a context of large companies with overburdened technology departments and users with no admin privileges, such a simple operation can become a major problem that takes time.

For system administrators around the world, a TGIF to remember. A huge business continuity problem that can affect many operations, and that is due not to a security problem, but to the increasingly complex houses of cards that have to be set up to simply to protect a machine from attack. This time, it’s a vendor of a security tool which has released an automatic update that obviously wasn’t sufficiently tested, and worse, has been using its criticism of Microsoft as a powerful marketing tool. As we were saying, karma is a bitch…

Let’s see how the issue evolves, where responsibilities lie, and how long it takes to normalize the situation.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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