There are a lot of misunderstandings about what happened. First, the ‘update’ was to a data file used by the crowdstrike kernel components (specifically ‘falcon’.) while this file has a ‘.sys’ name, it is not a driver, it provides threat definition data. It is read by the falcon driver(s), not loaded as an executable.

Microsoft doesn’t update this file, crowdstrike user mode services do that, and they do that very frequently as part of their real-time threat detection and mitigation.

The updates are essential. There is no opportunity for IT to manage or test these updates other than blocking them via external firewalls.

The falcon kernel components apparently do not protect against a corrupted data file, or the corruption in this case evaded that protection. This is such an obvious vulnerability that i am leaning toward a deliberate manipulation of the data file to exploit a discovered vulnerability in their handling of a malformed data file. I have no evidence for that other than resilience against malformed data input is very basic software engineering and crowdstrike is a very sophisticated system.

I’m more interested in how the file got corrupted before distribution.