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While CrowdStrike has since deployed a fix, it's understandable for businesses to be wary of CrowdStrike as a viable EDR provider given the scale of the incident. In this article, we take a look at the best CrowdStrike alternatives and competitors for you and your organization.
Estimated financial losses due to the recent massive IT outage triggered by the faulty CrowdStrike update are counted in billions, but the unfortunate incident is having several positive effects, as well. As CrowdStrike was forced to explain, in great detail, how they roll out updates for its Falcon Sensors, what testing they perform beforehand, and how they plan to improve the whole process to prevent similar accidents from happening in the future, other cybersecurity vendors - such as Fortinet, Secureworks, and Bitdefender - have spelled out their own software and content update release processes.
Redmond shared a technical incident response write-up on Saturday - titled "Windows Security best practices for integrating and managing security tools" - in which veep for enterprise and OS security David Weston explained how Microsoft measured the impact of the disaster: By accessing crash reports shared by customers. Weston's post justifies how Windows performed, on the grounds that kernel-level drivers - like those employed by CrowdStrike - can improve performance and prevent tampering with security software.
Microsoft has admitted that its estimate of 8.5 million machines crashed by CrowdStrike's faulty software update was almost certainly too low, and vowed to reduce infosec vendors' reliance on the kernel drivers at the heart of the issue. Redmond posted an incident response blog on Saturday - titled "Windows Security best practices for integrating and managing security tools" - in which veep for enterprise and OS security David Weston explained how Microsoft measured the impact of the incident: by accessing crash reports shared by customers.
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Opinion CrowdStrike's recent Windows debacle will surely earn a prominent place in the annals of epic tech failures. In the beginning, Microsoft enabled CrowdStrike's Falcon security software to run at the zero level of the Windows kernel.
CrowdStrike is alerting about an unfamiliar threat actor attempting to capitalize on the Falcon Sensor update fiasco to distribute dubious installers targeting German customers as part of a highly targeted campaign. The cybersecurity company said it identified what it described as an unattributed spear-phishing attempt on July 24, 2024, distributing an inauthentic CrowdStrike Crash Reporter installer via a website impersonating an unnamed German entity.
The cost of CrowdStrike's apocalyptic Falcon update that brought down millions of Windows computers last week may be in the billions of dollars, and insurance isn't covering most of that. Parametrix says insurance might only pay out about $540 million to $1.1 billion of that hit for the Fortune 500, or between 10 and 20 percent.
CrowdStrike is the latest lure being used to trick Windows users into downloading and running the notorious Lumma infostealing malware, according to the security shop's threat intel team, which spotted the scam just days after the Falcon sensor update fiasco. Lumma is a relatively popular stealer that has been in high demand among ransomware crews since 2022.
The market rewards short-term profit-maximizing systems, and doesn't sufficiently penalize such companies for the impact their mistakes can have. The asymmetry of costs is largely due to our complex interdependency on so many systems and technologies, any one of which can cause major failures.