Microsoft's analysis on the recent CrowdStrike disaster
published on 2024/07/29
In this blog post, we examine the recent CrowdStrike outage and provide a technical overview of the root cause. We also explain why security products use kernel-mode drivers today and the safety measures Windows provides for third-party solutions. In addition, we share how customers and security vendors can better leverage the integrated security capabilities of Windows for increased security and reliability. Lastly, we provide a look into how Windows will enhance extensibility for future security products.
CrowdStrike recently published a Preliminary Post Incident Review analyzing their outage. In their blog post, CrowdStrike describes the root cause as a memory safety issue—specifically a read out-of-bounds access violation in the CSagent driver. We leverage the Microsoft WinDBG Kernel Debugger and several extensions that are available free to anyone to perform this analysis. Customers with crash dumps can reproduce our steps with these tools.