Friend does incident response and Windows forensics, and pointed something (in retrospect) rather obvious out yesterday: the instructions for cleaning up simply told people to "delete .SYS files according to this wildcard". No additional context.

That caught his eye, because to him it sounded like madness. Apparently deleting random driver files is a fairly well known way to screw a Windows system up even more than it already was.

This statement from CS must have gone through legal and PR review, so we have to assume every word and statement has been carefully vetted from a cover-your-backside perspective. It is light on information content, but there must be reason for them to so forcefully telegraph that the files being deployed (and removed) are not themselves drivers.

They're getting blasted for causing a massive worldwide outage due to what is clearly inadequate quality control. I don't see why this is any better if it's "pushed a kernel-mode driver update with bugs in it" than if it's "released a product with buggy kernel-mode stuff that can be made to crash by an innocuous-looking data file, and then pushed a data file that made it crash". Same result either way. Same demonstration of inadequate quality control either way.

I think the story they're telling now, which so far as I know is the truth, looks worse for them, because it requires them to have screwed up their QC twice. Once when they made a product that do such bad things, and once when they pushed the data file to millions of PCs without checking what it did.

So I still don't see how "this particular file happens not to be kernel-mode code" makes them look any better, and therefore I don't see why they'd be saying it "to deflect blame". It doesn't deflect blame; they look just as bad either way.