Crowdstrike published a faulty update. Causes Windows to bluescreen. Driver is C-00000291*.sys. Will cause worldwide outages.
I am obtaining a copy of the driver to see if malicious or bad coding, if anybody else checking let me know.
If anybody is wondering the impact of the Crowdstrike thing - it’s really bad. Machines don’t boot.
The recovery is boot in safe mode, log in as local admin and delete things - which isn’t automateable. Basically Crowdstrike will be in very hot water.
You know it was coming...
Crowdstrike's BSOP theme tune
Favour to IT folks fixing - could you please copy the C-00000291*.sys file to somewhere and upload it to Virustotal, and reply with the Virustotal link or file hash? It's still unclear if the update was malicious or just a bug.
I've obtained copies of the .sys driver files Crowdstrike customers have. They're garbage. Each customer appears to have a different one.
They trigger an issue that causes Windows to blue screen.
I am unsure how these got pushed to customers. I think Crowdstrike might have a problem.
If anybody is wondering, the update was delivered via channel updates in Crowdstrike.
BBC tracker (they mix up an earlier Microsoft outage, what they're actually tracking is the Crowdstrike issue) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cnk4jdwp49et
The .sys files causing the issue are channel update files, they cause the top level CS driver to crash as they're invalidly formatted. It's unclear how/why Crowdstrike delivered the files and I'd pause all Crowdstrikes updates temporarily until they can explain.
This is going to turn out to be the biggest 'cyber' incident ever in terms of impact, just a spoiler, as recovery is so difficult.
CrowdStrike's shares are down 20% in pre-market.
I'm seeing people posting scripts for automated recovery.. Scripts don't work if the machine won't boot (it causes instant BSOD) -- you still need to manually boot the system in safe mode, get through BitLocker recovery (needs per system key), then execute anything.
Crowdstrike are huge, at a global scale that's going to take.. some time.
Crowdstrike statement: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cnk4jdwp49et?post=asset%3A0c379e1f-48df-493c-a11a-f6b1e3d1eb63#post
Basically 'it's not a security incident... we just bricked a million systems'
For anybody wondering why Microsoft keep ending up in the frame, they had an Azure outage and- this may be news to some people- a lot of Microsoft support staff are actually external vendors, eg TCS, Mindtree, Accenture etc.
Some of those vendors use Crowdstrike, and so those support staff have no systems.
But MS isn’t the outage cause today.
