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

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.

For any orgs in recovery mode, I'd suspend auto updates of CS for now.

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.

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.

@JaxxAI @GossiTheDog yes it should. Unless they changed it to a model where each driver has a dedicated address space and can't alter memory for other parts of the kernel. You should not catch "corrupted memory" exceptions and ignore them, as you have no idea if said corrupted memory is important to the rest of the system.

The same applies to most widely used kernels such as Linux.

Having drivers running outside the kernel is a great idea though, but hard due to performance. #Redox makes a pretty decent attempt

@JaxxAI @GossiTheDog so can Windows, and it will use the last known good configuration. But unfortunately there are exceptions.

And in many cases, you can't know who caused an issue. The altered memory may not be attributed to the faulting driver at all.