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by dblohm7 691 days ago
Microsoft added a feature to Windows that allows specially-signed antimalware drivers to be loaded extremely early in the boot sequence and be marked as non-optional. The idea is to give antimalware drivers the opportunity to load first, before anything else has had the chance to start.

Furthermore, if a driver is marked as optional and crashes, Windows can reboot with that optional driver disabled next time, preventing infinite crash/boot loops. Obviously that's no good if your antimalware driver gets disabled, so they can mark theirs as "required." Obviously in the CrowdStrike case, we got the worst of both worlds.