For those unfamiliar with CrowdStrike, it may come as quite a shock that one company’s software update could bring the digital world to its knees.
Crowdstrike is one of the largest cybersecurity companies in world and it develops software to help companies detect and prevent hacks. The company’s software is widely used by Fortune 500 companies and businesses around the globe for managing the security of devices operating on Windows.
Even if a business isn’t using the CrowdStrike security platform, their operations may still be affected by this outage. Businesses operating online often use other digital tools to help run their day-to-day. If the companies providing those digital tools are running CrowdStrike software, all of their clients could be affected.
How did the outage happen?
The company’s popular Falcon Sensor software appears to be the origin of the issue. Falcon is an antivirus platform used to secure “endpoints” like laptops, servers, mobile devices and point-of-sale systems. In order to monitor these endpoints for malicious software and suspicious activity, CrowdStrike software has deep-level access to the device’s operating system.
This is known as kernel-level access, referring to the core level of a computer’s operating system that facilitates interactions between software and hardware. Cybersecurity software often needs this highly privileged access so that it can access any part of a computer’s system that hackers may target.
The update that CrowdStrike pushed appears to have impacted the kernel-level driver that CrowdStrike uses to monitor devices for malware, according to IT analysts. The faulty code appears to be interacting with the Windows operating system and causing computers to crash.
These affected devices then get stuck in a cycle called boot looping, in which the computer fails to complete its regular boot up sequence and then reboots in a seemingly endless cycle.