A Delta Air Lines technician works on a set of screens showing blue pages and reads “Restore” at Delta Air Lines Terminal 2 at Los Angeles Airport on July 19, 2024. Companies, banks, TV channels and other businesses were disrupted following major computer system outages related to anti-virus program updates.
Etienne Laurent | AFP | Getty Images
Microsoft On Friday it said it would hold a conference for cybersecurity firms in September to discuss ways for the industry to evolve after the outage. mass strike A software update that crashed millions of Windows computers in July.
The incident caused chaos in the network connection system. Airlines canceled thousands of flights, logistics companies reported package delivery delays and hospitals postponed medical appointments. Delta Air LinesThe company said the outage cost it $550 million and is seeking compensation from CrowdStrike and Microsoft.
A Microsoft executive told CNBC that Microsoft will meet with CrowdStrike and other security companies at its campus in Redmond, Washington, on September 10 to discuss how to prevent similar problems in the future. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters publicly.
Participants at the Windows Endpoint Security Ecosystem Summit will explore the possibility of making applications rely more on a part of Windows called consumer mode rather than the more privileged core mode, the executive said.
CrowdStrike’s software checkpoint, Sentinel One Other products in the endpoint protection market currently rely on core mode. Such access helps SentinelOne “monitor and block bad behavior and prevent malware from shutting down security software,” a spokesman said.
Applications in user mode are isolated, which means that if one application crashes, it will not affect other applications. But a failure of a kernel-mode application can crash all of Windows. On July 19, CrowdStrike released a misconfigured content update for the Falcon sensor for Windows PCs, which was designed to collect data on a new attack that could cause an operating system-level crash. The IT administrator restarted the computers that had received the update, displaying “Blue Screen of Death” screens one after another.
The Microsoft executive said that removing core access in Windows would only solve a small part of the potential problems.
apple In recent years there have been limited Core Access in macOS and Company dissuade Developers avoid using core extensions.
Attendees at Microsoft’s Sept. 10 event will also discuss the adoption of eBPF technology, which checks whether a program can run without triggering a system crash, as well as memory-safe programming languages such as Rust, the executive said.
Microsoft last year Donated Donate $1 million to the nonprofit Rust Foundation, which provides stipends to people working on the language.
Microsoft competes with CrowdStrike through its Defender for Endpoint product. The executive said the team will participate like other cybersecurity companies and will not receive preferential treatment.
“We will share further updates on these conversations after the event,” Microsoft corporate vice president Aidan Marcus wrote in a blog post.
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