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During a congressional hearing on Tuesday, September 24, 2024, CrowdStrike testified before the United States House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection. Adam Meyers, Senior Vice President, Counter Adversary Operations for CrowdStrike, explained how exactly a faulty content update deployed by the cybersecurity vendor to its Falcon® software on July 19 crashed 8.5 million devices worldwide that ran the Microsoft Windows operating system – resulting in the “Blue Screen of Death.” It’s estimated the total financial loss to impacted organizations is a combined $5.4 billion. During the hearing, Meyers apologized on behalf of CrowdStrike and said the company has changed the way it validates and pushes out content updates to its software, but subcommittee members questioned whether or not the company would continue to make software updates directly to the kernel of each computer operating system running Falcon®. Meyers argued making updates to the kernel is industry standard for cybersecurity vendors, but that CrowdStrike is now giving users more involvement in when and where they choose to deploy the updates. Subcommittee members also questioned Meyers on why this outage impacted only Microsoft Windows OS enabled devices, highlighting the ubiquity of Microsoft products across all industries – including government.
Katie Bavoso is a 2017 Regional New England Emmy-nominated broadcaster with over a decade of professional content creation, production, hosting, and interviewing experience. Starting her career off in TV news, she pivoted to the IT channel to help connect vendors, solutions and services providers, and IT buyers through exciting video content and storytelling. Katie is now the host of Channel Insider: Partner POV, a video and podcast series shining a light on the most innovative solution providers of the IT channel.
