Security News > 2024 > August > Too late now for canary test updates, says pension fund suing CrowdStrike

In what will likely be one of many class-action complaints against the embattled IT security firm, a retirement association has accused CrowdStrike, its CEO George Kurtz, and CFO Burt Podbere of defrauding it and fellow shareholders by making false and misleading statements about the biz's Falcon endpoint defense software.

CrowdStrike and its top execs "Repeatedly touted the efficacy of the Falcon platform while assuring investors that CrowdStrike's technology was 'validated, tested, and certified,'" the Plymouth County Retirement Association's lawsuit [PDF], filed this week in Texas federal court, reads.

In the antivirus maker's preliminary post-incident review published after it crashed millions of Microsoft Windows boxes around the world with a bad Falcon sensor update, CrowdStrike promised to improve its software testing and deployment by, among other things, implementing a canary deployment strategy, starting with pushing changes to a small subset of users to see how it goes and then gradually deploying to larger portions of customers.

Previously CrowdStrike would automatically distribute files that improved or tweaked the operation of its thread-detection system Falcon to all customer installations at once.

"Since the CrowdStrike outage, publicly revealed evidence indicates that CrowdStrike was taking insufficient precautions regarding such updates," the lawsuit stated.

The Falcon update that was heard around the world, and broke IT systems globally, sent CrowdStrike's stock tumbling more than 11 percent, according to the legal complaint, hurting investors including the retirement fund, which is seeking damages.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/01/crowdstrike_lawsuit/