It’s one of the better EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) tools on the market. For enterprises, they are able to suck down tons of system activities and provide alerting for security teams.
For detection, when I say “tons of data”, I mean it. Any background logs related to network activity, filesystem activity, command line info, service info, service actions and much more for every endpoint in an organization.
The response component can block execution of apps or completely isolate an endpoint if it is compromised, only allowing access by security staff.
Because Crowdstrike can (kind of) handle that much data and still be able to run rule checks while also providing SOC services makes them a common choice for enterprises.
The problem is that EDR tools need to run at the kernel level (or at a very high permission level) to be able to read that type data and also block it. This increases the risk of catastrophic problems if specific drivers are blocked by another kind of anti-malware service.
When you look at how EDR tools function, there is little difference between them and well written malware.
Crowdstrike became a choice recently for many companies that got fucked over by Broadcom buying VMWare. VMWare owned another tool, Carbon Black, which became subject to the fuckery of Broadcom so more companies scrambled to Crowdstrike recently.
I hope that was enough of a summary.
Security and compliance. It’s a certification that you’re following best practices, IT and otherwise.
It kinda is top of its class in endpoint detection and response software. A lot of cyber security insurance policies will demand you have some kind of EDR to be covered and seeing as Crowdstrike is one of the biggest names they get a lot of buyin from institutions and governments.
No, but yes.
Crowdstrike was one of the first companies doing EDR, and have a first mover advantage they have held onto. Lots of other companies offer good solutions now, but crowdstrike is still considered the gold standard, and they have worked hard to become the “default” for their market segment.
What CrowdStrike is actually selling, is someone who actually looks at the system logs and who pushes a button when something pops up. Roughly.
There are better solutions on the market. Unfortunately CrowdStrike has the more aggressive sales team.
For those wondering, I’m referring to *nix based solutions like SElinux, appArmor, iptables, nftables, cgroups, … But you need to monitor your logs if you want to take appropriate action.
A lot of companies install it for compliance checkboxing.
It’s not so much that it’s ubiquitous so much as the customers that DID use it were very large and their going down was very noticeable.
Basically, drivers can launch code all the way up to ring 0, the highest level a code can access to. This mean it runs its code with the same priviledges as the kernel itself. The anti-malware solution CrowdStrike makes use of this access to determine what could be going wrong, and deploy solutions accordingly.
If a code running in that level crashes, Windows will rightfully assume there’s something really fucked up is going on, and give out a BSOD.
there’s something really fucked up going on
I would actually prefer this kind of error over the usual and equally uninformative “Oopsie! Something went wrong. We’re sorry :(”
