In a detailed review of the incident published on Wednesday, external CrowdStrike said there was a “bug” in a system designed to ensure software updates work properly.
Crowdstrike said the glitch meant “problematic content data” in a file went undetected.
The company said it could prevent the incident from happening again with better software testing and checks, including more scrutiny from developers.
The faulty update crashed 8.5 million Microsoft Windows computers around the world and George Kurtz, Crowdstrike’s boss, has apologised for the impact of the outage.
But cybersecurity experts told BBC News that the review revealed the firm made “major mistakes”.
“What’s clear from the post mortem is they didn’t seem to have the right guardrails in place to prevent this type of incident or to reduce the risk of it occurring,” said cyber-security consultant Daniel Card.
His thoughts were echoed by cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont, who said the key lesson from CrowdStrike’s review was that the firm doesn’t “test in waves”.
“They just deploy to all customers at once in a so called ‘rapid response update’ which was obviously a huge mistake,” he said.
But Sam Kirkman from cybersecurity firm NetSPI told the BBC the review showed CrowdStrike “took steps” to prevent the outages.
He said these steps “have likely been effective to prevent incidents on countless occasions prior to last week”.
source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce58p0048r0o
