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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Every affected company should be extremely thankful that this was an accidental bug, because if crowdstrike gets hacked, it means the bad actors could basically ransom I don't know how many millions of computers overnight
Not to mention that crowdstrike will now be a massive target from hackers trying to do exactly this
Don't Google solar winds
Holy hell
New vulnerability just dropped
Oooooooo this one again thank you for reminding me
That one turns out to have been largely Microsoft's fault for repeatedly ignoring warnings of a severe vulnerability relating to Active Directory. Microsoft were warned about it, acknowledged it and ignored it for years until it got used in the Solar Winds hack.
lesson not learned
security as a service is about to cost the world a pretty penny.
You mean it's going to cost corporations a pretty penny. Which means they'll pass those "costs of operation" on to the rest of us. Fuck.
well, the world does include the rest of us.
and its not just opeerational costs. what happens when an outage lasts 3+ days and affects all communication and travel? thats another massive shock to the system.
they come faster and faster.
Either that or cyber instance
Where's my fuckin raise
All the more reason for companies to ignore security until they're affected personally. The companies I've worked for barely ever invested in future cost-savings.
On Monday I will once again be raising the point of not automatically updating software. Just because it's being updated does not mean it's better and does not mean we should be running it on production servers.
Of course they won't listen to me but at least it's been brought up.
Thank God someone else said it. I was constantly in an existential battle with IT at my last job when they were constantly forcing updates, many of which did actually break systems we rely on because Apple loves introducing breaking changes in OS updates (like completely fucking up how dynamic libraries work).
Updates should be vetted. It's a pain in the ass to do because companies never provide an easy way to rollback, but this really should be standard practice.
You can use AirWatch to deal with Apple devices. Although it is a clunky program it does at least give you the ability to roll things back.
I thought it was a security definition download; as in, there's nothing short of not connecting to the Internet that you can do about it.
Well I haven't looked into it for this piece of software but essentially you can prevent automatic updates from applying to the network. Usually because the network is behind a firewall that you can use to block the update until you decide that you like it.
Also a lot of companies recognize that businesses like to check updates and so have more streamlined ways of doing it. For instance Apple have a whole dedicated update system for iOS devices that only businesses have access to where you can decide you don't want the latest iOS and it's easy you just don't enable it and it doesn't happen.
Regardless of the method, what should happen is you should download the update to a few testing computers (preferably also physically isolated from the main network) and run some basic checks to see if it works. In this case the testing computers would have blue screened instantly, and you would have known that this is not an update that you want on your system. Although usually requires a little bit more investigation to determine problems.
It makes me so fuckdamn angry that people make this assumption.
This Crowdstrike update was NOT pausable. You cannot disable updates without disabling the service as they get fingerprint files nearly every day.
I hear you, but there's no reason to be angry.
When I first learned of the issue, my first thought was, "Hey our update policy doesn't pull the latest sensor to production servers." After a little more research I came to the same conclusion you did, aside from disconnecting from the internet there's nothing we really could have done.
There will always be armchair quarterbacks, use this as an opportunity to teach, life's too short to be upset about such things.
It doesn't help that I'm medically angry 80% of the time for mostly no reason, but even without that this would incense me because I've had 40+ users shouting similar uneducated BS at me yesterday thinking that it was personally my fault that 40% of the world bluescreened. No I am not exaggerating.
I have written and spoken phrases 'No we could not prevent this update' so many times in the last 24 hours that they have become meaningless to me through semantic satiation.
I've got a feeling crowdstrike won't be as grand of target anymore. They're sure to lose a lot of clients...at least until they spin up a new name and erease all traces of "crowdstrike".
I don't think they will lose any big clients. I am sure they will have insurance to take care of compensations.
That trick doesn't work for B2B as organizations tend to do their research before buying. Consumers tend not to.
Third parties being able to push updates to production machines without being tested first is giant red flag for me. We’re human … we fuck up. I understand that. But that’s why you test things first.
I don’t trust myself without double checking, so why would we completely trust a third party so completely.
I'd assume state (or other serious) actors already know about these companies.
This is why I openly advocate for a diverse ecosystems of services, so not everyone is affected if the biggest gets targeted.
But unfortunately, capitalism favors only the frontrunner and everyone else can go spin, and we aren't getting rid of capitalism anytime soon.
So basically, it is inevitable that crowdstrike WILL be hacked, and the next time will be much much worse.
Properly regulated capitalism breaks up monopolies so new players can enter the market. What you're seeing is dysfunctional capitalism - an economy of monopolies.
Sorry no, capitalism is working exactly as intended. Concentration of wealth breaks regulation with unlimited political donations.
You call it unregulated, but that is the natural trend for when the only acceptable goal is the greater accumulation of wealth. There comes a time when that wealth is financially best spent buying politicians.
Until there are inherent mechanisms within capitalism to prevent special interest money from pushing policy and direct regulatory capture, capitalism will ALWAYS trend to deregulation.
Yes...obviously.
And that IS dysfunctional capitalism.
That's exactly what I'm saying, dude.
This is NOT capitalism working as intended. This is broken capitalism. Runaway capitalism. Corrupt capitalism.
Its like saying we just need good kings, no ids a bad system. Any capitalist system will devolve in corruption and monopoly. No regulations can survive the unavailable regulatory capture and corruption.
No system is perfect. All systems require some form of keeping power from accruing to the few.
Yes, very insightful.
Nah unregulated is the exact right word and that isn't the kind of neolib you're out for. Those would use "free" instead of unregulated, deliberately confusing unregulated markets with the theoretical model of the free market which allocates resources perfectly -- if everyone is perfectly rational and acts on perfect information. Which obviously is not the case in the real world because real-world.
There's a strain of liberalism which is pretty much the cornerstone of Europe's economical model, also, generally compatible with socdem approaches, and it says precisely that regulation should be used to bring the real-world market closer to that theoretical ideal -- they're of course not going all-out, you'd need to do stuff like outlaw trade secrets to actually do that, have all advertisement done by an equitable and accountable committee and shit. But by and large regulation does take the edge off capitalism. If you want to see actually unregulated capitalism, have a look at Mexican cartels. Rule of thumb: If you see some market failure, regulate it away. Like make producers of cereal pay for the disposal costs of the packaging they use and suddenly they have an interest in making that packaging more sensible, can't externalise the cost any more.
Defeating capitalism ultimately is another fight altogether, it's nothing less than defeating greed -- as in not the acquisition of things, but getting addicted to the process of acquisition: The trouble isn't that people want shit the problem is that they aren't satisfied once they've got what they wanted. Humanity is going to take some more time to learn to not do that, culturally, (and before tankies come along nah look at how corrupt all those ML states were and are same problem different coat of paint), in the meantime regulation, rule of law, democracy, even representative democracy, checks and balances, all that stuff, is indeed a good idea.
would you like an introduction to the almighty red rose?
I know you are trying to be clever but I'm not really in a clever mood rn.
If you start regulating capitalism, thats called something else. That would be saying that the markets can not regulate by themselves, and proving as a myth one of the basics of capitalism.
So I, as well, think capitalism is working as intended. and sure is based on greed.
Something else, as in what? As long as the means of production is privately owned for profit, it's capitalism.
Years ago I read an study about insurance companies and diversification of assets in Brazil. By regulation, an individual insurance company need to have a diversified investment portfolio, but the insurance market as a whole not. the diversification of every individual company sum, as a whole of all the insurance market, as an was exposed market, and the researchers found, iirc, like 3 banks that if they fail they can cause a chain reaction that would take out the entire insurance market.
Don't know why, but your comment made me remind of that.
That's kind of fascinating, never considered what the results of that kind of regulation can bring without anyone even noticing it at the time. Thanks for a good reading topic for lunch!
Yeah the fact that this company calls it feature that they can push an update anytime without site level intervention is scary to me. If they ever did get compromised boom every device running their program suddenly has a kernel level malware essentially overnight.