Todays we are seeing major disruptions to IT infrastructure worldwide, afecting Airlines, Banks, Hospitals, Emergency services, Telecom companies, Media outlets, Payments processing, among others. [1] [2]
The root cause seems to be a faulty update released by CrowdStrike, a Cybersecurity company, for Falcon Sensor, their Endpoint Protection solution, which caused computer to lock-up and not turn-on properly, showing a Blue-screen error.
In an unrelated event, Microsoft Azure Cloud services also had major issues around the time of the “CrowdStrike problem” a Central US Azure outage (Tracking Id: 1K80-N_8) – those issues with Azure seem to be already mostly resolved. [3]
Solution for IT admins
As the affected computers and not running properly, unfortunately it seems they will need to be fixed one-by-one.
The solution seems to be:
1. Boot into Safe mode or the Windows Recovery Environment 2. Run the command: del "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike\C-00000291*.sys" 3. Reboot
Key takeaways
Software and Hardware Vendors have a high responsibility and should extensively test their products – both with automated tools and manually
Vendors should do gradual releases of software updates, with live monitoring for issues and clients reported issues
You don’t release significant updates on a Friday!
Vendors should provide easy options or tools to control updates: delay updates for X amount of days, completely disable updates should always be available for IT admins
For companies at large, they should have mechanisms to delay or manually approve updates for their entire IT infrastrucutre – unfortunately this is not always easy and is largely dependant of options provided (or not provided) by Vendors
Remember the 3 basic principles of Cybersecurity are Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability, in the quest to secure the systems we should pay attention to issues like this, which end-up causing as much disruptions as a major CyberAttack.
We should also be aware that Cybersecurity is, in large part, a risk-management and a balancing act between those 3 pillars.
I’m very happy to announce that today I signed a work contract with Microsoft!
I will be working in Cybersecurity, as a Support Engineer, providing technical support and advice related to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, to clients in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
I’m also happy that the Certified Ethical Hacker certification helped me get this job – it was one of the preferred qualifications on the job posting.
I will start in less than 1 month, working for Microsoft Portugal, and certainly will have more news soon!
Run this as Administrator: reg.exe add “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer” /v DisableSearchBoxSuggestions /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
