“CrowdStrike is far from the only security firm to trigger Windows crashes with a driver update. Updates to Kaspersky and even Windows’ own built-in antivirus software Windows Defender have caused similar Blue Screen of Death crashes in years past.”
“‘People may now demand changes in this operating model,’ says Jake Williams, vice president of research and development at the cybersecurity consultancy Hunter Strategy. ‘For better or worse, CrowdStrike has just shown why pushing updates without IT intervention is unsustainable.’”
Agreed, this seems like a pretty obvious failed smoke test.
Three options seem likely to me: the build was untested, the final package got corrupted after testing, the test environment has some kind of abberant config that hid the defect.
Kernel drivers are “reviewed” and signed by Microsoft for exactly this reason. It’s a security risk if any program an administrator runs could load malicious kernel drivers into windows