Panoramic view of Rome Fiumicino International Airport on July 19, 2024 in Rome, Italy. Passengers gathered and waited due to a global communication outage caused by CrowdStrike (which provides network security services to the American technology company Microsoft).
Ricardo De Luca | Ricardo De Luca Anadolu | Getty Images
A mass strike A software update last week that crashed computers around the world, affecting services including airlines, banks and healthcare, was because of flaws in the U.S. cybersecurity firm’s quality control mechanisms, the company said on Wednesday.
Friday’s outage occurred because CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor, an advanced platform that protects systems from malware and hackers, contained a glitch that forced computers to MicrosoftThe Windows operating system crashes and displays “Blue Screen of Death”.
“Due to a bug in the content validator, one of the two template instances passed validation despite containing problematic content data,” CrowdStrike said in a statementrefers to a failure of internal quality control mechanisms that allows problematic data to slip past a company’s own security checks.
CrowdStrike did not say what that content data was or why the problem occurred. A “template instance” is a set of instructions that instructs software on what threats to look for and how to respond. CrowdStrike said it has added “new checks” to its quality control process to prevent the problem from happening again.
The extent of the damage caused by the failed update is still being assessed. On Saturday, Microsoft said about 8.5 million Windows devices were affected, and the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee has sent a letter CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz asked him to testify.
CrowdStrike posted last week that it was fixing affected systems, but experts say getting them back online will take time because of the need to manually clean up the flawed code.
Wednesday’s statement was Meets widely held assessments Cybersecurity experts say serious errors occurred in CrowdStrike’s quality control process.
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