CrowdStrike: What is it, what happened?

An update at Crowdstrike is being blamed for a worldwide Windows outage that grounded flights and impacted global business.

The issue was caused by Crowdstrike, whose CEO George Kurtz said that it was a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyber attack.”

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But what is CrowdStrike?

CrowdStrike is a global cybersecurity firm and one of its clients is Microsoft Windows.

Its primary program is CrowdStrike Falcon, a cybersecurity platform that large companies, global banks, healthcare, energy companies and the government use.

The company, on its website, says, “CrowdStrike secures the most critical areas of risk – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity, and data – to keep customers ahead of today’s adversaries and stop breaches.”

It adds that Falcon “leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence on evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities – all through a single, lightweight agent.”