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this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Inb4 an out of court settlement happens in about a year and a half with CS not admitting fault but paying an undisclosed amount to Delta.
Also, this will be interesting.
Isn't autoupdating software by definition an authorized backdoor by virtue of enabling it? The whole premise of CrowdStrike is continuous updates for attacks they see in the wild on other companies' systems.
Also if anything CrowdStrike did the opposite of a backdoor since everyone needed to find their BitLocker keys to get back in and clean this mess. It locked out the front and back door.
Yes crowd strike is a huge security risk
There was an additional auto update function that wasn't disclosed. Delta had disabled the auto update because, like many large companies, they prefer to deploy changes incrementally so that an issue doesn't blow-up all their systems at once.
So...
Yes. Which is why they contend disabling it makes it unauthorized.
That's not how that works. CS didn't have at the time, an option to disable channel file updates. It's how their edr works. Delta's mssp or secops group, %100 knew this as it's in CS own documentation. They really don't have a foot to stand on here, but CS will pay it to make it go away.
Yes, that's the crux of the accusation. Given the large number of people who seemed to be under the impression that selecting a staggered release cadence would protect them from a faulty update, it's not unreasonable to think that people were caught off guard by a second autoupdate system that they couldn't configure that could also tank their system.
Before this, you could throttle the rollout for channel files. You could knock it down to 1 a minute if you wanted.
Channel files were not something that CS admins didn't know about.
I wouldn't call an auto update mechanism an unauthorised backdoor, it is required behaviour for that kind of software.
It's absolutely not required behavior! Software for servers has very different requirements from software for end users, and if you have a lot of them you also want to manage your end user machines differently.
Updates can go wrong, and if you roll out a bad update to everything at once you can crash everything and lose a lot of money. As aptly demonstrated by cloudstrike.
That's why Delta and many other companies disabled the auto update functions: so they could control the rollout cadence.
They reasonably believed that disabling autoupdates disabled them. They didn't expect a second autoupdate system that wasn't documented, wasn't controlled by the autoupdate system settings and couldn't be disabled.
It's not a second auto update. It's %100 documented in the software and you can %100 throttle it. Channel files are heavily discussed when you roll out CS.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/falcon-content-update-preliminary-post-incident-report/
Might want to let crowdstrike know.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/23/crowdstrike_lessons_to_learn/
Maybe you're thinking of changes that they made as a result of the incident?
No channel files where %100 there. It's in the general GUI settings. You could throttle channel files. Now after this your able to do General availability, Early availability or pausing them.