The global outage caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike on Friday affected some 8.5 million Windows devices. Microsoft The update triggered a blue screen of death, temporarily paralyzing systems used by hospitals, airlines, banks and other important services. Only machines running Windows were affected.
While the issue was largely resolved by Friday afternoon, Microsoft and CrowdStrike are still dealing with the fallout. In Saturday's blog post, Microsoft's vice president of enterprise and OS security, David Weston, wrote that the company is working with CrowdStrike to “develop a scalable solution that will help Microsoft's Azure infrastructure accelerate the remediation of CrowdStrike's faulty update.” Microsoft has also enlisted the help of amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Mass coup In his own blog post on Saturday, Weston said the update — a sensor configuration update — “was designed to target new malicious pipelines that have been observed and that common C2 frameworks use in cyberattacks.” Unfortunately, for devices running Windows 7.11 and later that use CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor, “a logic error was triggered that resulted in an operating system crash.” The total number of affected devices turned out to be “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” according to Weston.
