Microsoft announced that it will hold a special conference in September to discuss security measures and lessons the industry can learn from the CrowdStrike crisis in July. The Windows Endpoint Security Ecosystem Summit will be held on September 10 at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond.
The event will feature representatives from Microsoft, CrowdStrike and other cyber and computer security companies, and attendees will explore changes in industry practices and the use of practices that could prevent similar crises from occurring in the future.
Speaking to CNBC, an unnamed Microsoft executive said one of the conference’s talking points will be the use of applications that rely more on Windows’ user mode than kernel mode. The July outage occurred because CrowdStrike’s broker runs in kernel mode, where the central processing unit gives software full access to a system’s resources and hardware. Applications in user mode run in more isolation and therefore don’t crash other systems.
Microsoft to Discuss More Secure Programming Language Alternatives at CrowdStrike Concert
Participants will also discuss implementing eBPF technology into systems to control programs without causing system-wide crashes. The conference will also feature sessions on using safer programming languages such as Rust, which are alternatives to programming languages such as C or C++.
CrowdStrike said that the problem, which started on July 19 and caused 8.5 million Windows devices to shut down, was caused by faulty test software included in the update. Banks, airlines and businesses around the world were unable to work for a while due to the “blue screen” error caused by this problem.