CrowdStrike faces onslaught of legal action from faulty software update | TechCrunch
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CrowdStrike faces widespread lawsuits from a faulty software update that brought down Windows machines across the world in July.

I would honestly think freezing airports, hospitals and other services for days would cause a lot of legal trouble.

At least that’s what would happen if an experienced hacker did the same thing.

  • DigitalDilemmaEnglish
    20•2 months ago

    They have a shitload of big contracts with a great many companies across the world. Money keeps coming in.

    Legal actions take time. Years. Sometimes decades.

    The software, when it isn’t bricking computers, is actually pretty good.

    This could equally have been caused by any other software running at ring 0. That’s most antivirus software and most drivers. Drivers caused BSODs all the time - the difference here is only one of scale and timing. And, as it turns out, some pretty terrible quality control, test processes and release scheduling - and that is likely to be the focus of many of the legal actions.

    Your reference to a hacker is spurious - deliberate vs accidental is a major distinction. As is cause and effect - Microsoft can be seen as equally to blame for allowing software to run at ring 0 and allowing this to happen.

    • @clutchtwopointzero
      6•2 months ago

      Need to remember that Microsoft was forced by regulators overseas to allow ring 0 third party software as part of antitrust proceedings. But the notion that antivirus software companies must be allowed to exist (instead of making the kernel infection proof) is also ridiculous

      • DigitalDilemmaEnglish
        4•2 months ago

        Microsoft was forced by regulators overseas to allow ring 0 third party software as part of antitrust proceedings.

        Interesting - I wasn’t aware of that. Gave me a few minutes of interesting googling, thanks.

        Looks like some people don’t agree that is an excuse.

        Also worth remembering is that Crowdstrike stopped RHEL 9 machines booting in a vaguely similar update to their falcon service a few months earlier, so it’s not something that is exclusive to Windows. That also needed manual intervention to get vms booting. (I dealt with that one too - but it’s easier to roll back to the previous kernel with Linux and we had fewer machines that were running falcon) Not surprisingly, there was a very similar blame game played them.

        • @clutchtwopointzero
          1•2 months ago

          I heard the argument on the link you shared before but I can’t figure out what “appropriate controls” would look like. That too sounds quite hand-wavy.