Matthew RosenquistFounder & CISO Advisor, Cybersecurity Insights · CISO, Cybersecurity Strategist, & Industry Advisor

Windows Blue Screens of Death are a Problem to Fix

23 Jul 2024 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:00

In this YouTube monologue, Matthew Rosenquist explains how a faulty CrowdStrike update triggered a wave of Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) errors. He notes that CrowdStrike, a major cybersecurity firm, distributes updates to a large user base, and the problematic update caused BSODs to appear en masse, likening the visual to the Christmas lights scene from the movie "Christmas Vacation." He highlights that security tools like CrowdStrike load very early in the boot process, which means that once a BSOD occurs, the offending driver is re‑loaded on every reboot, causing the crash to recur before the user can intervene. While fixes exist—official instructions and tools released by CrowdStrike and Microsoft—some of these solutions require a technician to physically access the device, making remediation potentially difficult for end‑users.

Chapters

Let's talk about the impacts now. With CrowdStrike being one of the biggest cybersecurity firms and having a large user base, when the bad update went out, the BSOD screens began lighting up like Christmas at the Griswolds. Okay, so that's a movie reference, Christmas Vacation, Chevy Chase, go look it up. To add insult to injury, security tools often load very early in the boot cycle. So they can observe what other programs are doing at startup, which means if you get the blue screen of death, even if you reboot, the problem reappears before it's easy to do anything about it. It is fixable, but to fix it is not necessarily easy or straightforward. There are now instructions and tools from CrowdStrike and Microsoft which are available, but even some of those require a tech person to visit the device