Internet security experts point out that everything indicates that the routine update of the protection program “Falcon Sensor” of the American company “CrowdStrike”, which caused a halt in the operation of computer systems around the world, did not pass adequate quality checks before being put into operation.
The latest version of the program update was supposed to further secure the system operation of CrowdStrike clients from hacker intrusions, but the wrong code in the files resulted in one of the biggest downtimes in the work of computers of companies that use the operating system of the technological giant “Microsoft”.
Banks, airlines, hospitals and government offices around the world have been disrupted due to this problem.
“CrowdStrike” has published information about the repair of the affected systems, but experts believe that it will take some time to normalize the business, since the questionable code must be removed manually.
The problems appeared immediately after the disputed update was implemented and users posted photos on social media of computers with “blue screens of death” written on them as a malfunction.
Patrick Wardle, one of the security researchers whose specialty is the threat against operating systems, pointed out that the analysis determined the code responsible for the outage.
“The problem with the update was in a configuration or signature information file. Similar signatures are code that finds certain types of malicious code or malware. It’s common for security products to update their signatures once a day because they’re constantly monitoring for new threats and want to make sure that are their users protected from the latest threats,” Wardle emphasized.
According to him, the frequency of updates is the most likely reason why “CrowdStrike” did not perform additional checks.
It is not known how the faulty code got into the update and why it was not detected before it was released to users, Reuters writes.
