CrowdStrike downtime apparently caused by update that replaced a file with 42kb of zeroes
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to 
twiiit.com
…according to a Twitter post by the Chief Informational Security Officer of Grand Canyon Education.
So, does anyone else find it odd that the file that caused everything CrowdStrike to freak out, C-00000291-
00000000-00000032.sys was 42KB of blank/null values, while the replacement file C-00000291-00000000-
00000.033.sys was 35KB and looked like a normal, if not obfuscated sys/.conf file?
Also, apparently CrowdStrike had at least 5 hours to work on the problem between the time it was discovered and the time it was fixed.
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If I had to bet my money, a bad machine with corrupted memory pushed the file at a very final stage of the release.
The astonishing fact is that for a security software I would expect all files being verified against a signature (that would have prevented this issue and some kinds of attacks
So here's my uneducated question: Don't huge software companies like this usually do updates in "rollouts" to a small portion of users (companies) at a time?
I mean yes, but one of the issuess with "state of the art av" is they are trying to roll out updates faster than bad actors can push out code to exploit discovered vulnerabilities.
The code/config/software push may have worked on some test systems but MS is always changing things too.
Somone else said this wasn't a case of this breaks on windows system version XXX with update YYY on a Tuesday at 12:24 pm when clock is set to eastern standard time. It literally breaks on ANY windows machine, instantly, on boot. There is no excuse for this.
the smart ones probably do
Companies don't like to be beta testers. Apparently the solution is to just not test anything and call it production ready.
Every company has a full-scale test environment. Some companies are just lucky enough to have a separate prod environment.
Peak programmer humor
I'm a bit rusty. I'd give it a C++.
That's certainly what we do in my workplace. Shocked that they don't.
When I worked at a different enterprise IT company, we published updates like this to our customers and strongly recommended they all have a dedicated pool of canary machines to test the update in their own environment first.
I wonder if CRWD advised their customers to do the same, or soft-pedaled the practice because it’s an admission there could be bugs in the updates.
I know the suggestion of keeping a stage environment was off putting to smaller customers.
Which is still unacceptable.
Windows kernel drivers are signed by Microsoft. They must have rubber stamped this for this to go through, though.
This was not the driver, it was a config file or something read by the driver. Now having a driver in kernel space depending on a config on a regular path is another fuck up
isn't .sys a driver?
Not just drivers, no https://fileinfo.com/extension/sys
So yes, .sys is by convention on Windows is for a kernel mode driver. However, Crowdstrike specifically uses .sys for non-driver files and this specifically was not a driver.
What about the Mac and Linux PCs? Did Microsoft sign those too?
only the Windows version was affected
Not sure about Mac, but on Linux, they're signed by the distro maintainer or with the computer's secure boot key.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot
So... Microsoft couldn't have "rubber-stamped" anything to do with the outage.
The outage only affected the Windows version of Falcon. OSX and Linux were not affected.
This time. Last time it did affect Linux. It doesn't have anything to do with Microsoft.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
In this thread we're talking about the recent problem with CrowdStrike on Windows that brought down various services around the world. So I don't know who's bubble you think you're bursting by talking about something else.
You l people have a horrible time following threads.
what are you on about? who suggested anything about microsoft?
Try to keep up.
You look so kewl if I were a child again I'd speak just like you
Quoting the comment that started this thread is speaking like a child to you?
From my experience it was more likely to be an accidental overwrite from human error with recent policy changes that removed vetting steps.
Which is still unacceptable.