[Not really OT] Crowdstrike Analysis: It was a NULL pointer from the memory unsafe C++ language.

[Walter Bright]

I talked with a person who has more in depth knowledge about it.

The null pointer came from reading a file and treating it as a data structure. 
The file was unexpectedly full of zeros.

Any language that allows casting a buffer read from the disk to a pointer would 
fail. This includes any language with unsafe blocks, or uses a FFI to get around 
the language protections.