A little bit of history repeating

CrowdStrike probably had a bigger impact than any IT outage in history, but it’s had strong competition, not least from McAfee almost 15 years ago. McAfee’s 2010 blunder bore a striking resemblance to CrowdStrike. The firm released an antivirus update that inadvertently flagged a critical Windows file (svchost.exe) as a malicious threat. Affected machines entered a reboot cycle, and its effect was felt in government agencies, hospitals and beyond. McAfee issued an emergency fix and instructions on how to manually restore affected systems. There’s another similarity between the two incidents. McAfee’s chief technology officer during the 2010 blunder, George Kurtz, is now the CEO of CrowdStrike. There is, of course, no suggestion that is anything other than a desperately unfortunate coincidence, but if you’re the man involved, well… that’s gotta Kurtz.…

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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, October 2024

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