July 23 (Portaltic/EP) –
Microsoft The company was unable to prevent the global outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update because of an agreement reached with the European Commission in which it agreed to grant security software makers kernel access privileges, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
The company suffered a service outage in the early hours of Thursday to Friday last week due to a failure of the security platform of which it is a client, CrowdStrike. This put into circulation an erroneous version of the Falcon platform, which is used by companies in different sectors, such as airlines, banks and media.
The global outage of Microsoft services resulted in less than one percent of devices affected. This means that the error affected 8.5 million devices with its operating system, according to its most recent estimates, shared on its blog.
This bug was exclusive to the content update for Windows hosts and did not affect Mac and Linux computers, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said. The executive, who will appear before the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday to explain what happened, said The Washington Postadvanced through X that it was not a security incident or a cyber attack.
On Microsoft PCs, CrowdStrike’s security software runs on top of the Windows kernel, so when the aforementioned buggy update was deployed on these devices, the operating system crashed and consequently displayed the Blue Screen of Death.
The technology company, which has made available to users a series of tools to end this problem on those devices in which it still persists, has explained in The Wall Street Journal why, unlike in the computers manufactured by Apple, the error did reach Windows.
Apple operates a closed ecosystem that offers “a much healthier balance between forcing people to update and forcing apps to maintain good security practices or they get pulled from the App Store,” said Amit Yoran, CEO of cybersecurity firm Tenable.
In addition, the Cupertino firm removed kernel-level access from developers in 2020. This “It meant that many outsiders had to rewrite their own software. “security,” according to Patrick Wardle, CEO of Mac security solutions developer DoubleYou.
Microsoft cannot therefore legally block its operating system in the same way that Apple does due to an agreement it reached with the European Commission in 2009, as a spokesperson for the Redmond company has declared to the aforementioned media. This determined that the American technology company would give security software manufacturers the same level of access privileges to the system that it has itself.
This measure is part of a resolution approved in December of that year whereby Microsoft committed to promoting competition in the field of web browsing software and interoperability between different Microsoft products and those of the competition.
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