We finally know what caused the global tech outage

"CrowdStrike said it also plans to move to a staggered approach to releasing content updates so that not everyone receives the same update at once, and to give customers more fine-grained control over when the updates are installed."

Hol up. So they like still get to exist? Microsoft and affected industries just gonna kinda move past this?

Haven't seen anything from the affected major players. Obviously Crowdstrike isn't going to say they are fucked long term, they have to act like this is just a little hiccup and move on. Lawsuits are absolutely incoming
We'll see how fucked they are from SLA breaches/etc., and then we'll see how many companies jump ship to an alternative. We won't have the real fallout from this event for months or years.
Newsflash, Solarwinds still exists too. Not sure I could name a company that screwed up so big and actually paid the price.
- Yeah, what was I thinking. United airlines was bankrupt and literally beating people up on their planes and still got taxpayer payouts and is around paying investors divends still today.
- Two days ago my company sent out an all hands email that we're going company wide with Crowdstrike.
I wasn't effected but I bet a lot of admins, as pissed as they were, were thinking "I could easily fuck up this bad or worse".
- Yeah, what's the jokey parable thing?
  A CTO is at lunch when a call comes in. There's been a huge outage, caused by a low level employee pressing the wrong button.
  "Damn, you going to fire that guy?"
  "Hell no, do you know how much I just spent on training him to never do that again?"
  (
  </Blah>
  )
Companies using CrowdStrike and Windows aren't really the type to be active about this sort of thing.
- What do you mean by this?

$5.4 Bn so far, not including lost worker productivity or damage to brand reputations, so that's a very conservative estimate. And Cybersecurity insurance will supposedly only cover up to 20% of that (but good luck getting even that much). What a clusterf***

And that $5,400,000,000 loss estimate is only Fortune 500 companies!
- No it's all of them because all the companies combined out side of the 500 wouldn't even have enough net worth large enough to move the needle. So technically they may not be included but would be covered by whatever amount they rounded up to make the even 5.4b

On Wednesday, CrowdStrike released a report outlining the initial results of its investigation into the incident, which involved a file that helps CrowdStrike’s security platform look for signs of malicious hacking on customer devices.

The company routinely tests its software updates before pushing them out to customers, CrowdStrike said in the report. But on July 19, a bug in CrowdStrike’s cloud-based testing system — specifically, the part that runs validation checks on new updates prior to release — ended up allowing the software to be pushed out “despite containing problematic content data.”

...

When Windows devices using CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity tools tried to access the flawed file, it caused an “out-of-bounds memory read” that “could not be gracefully handled, resulting in a Windows operating system crash,” CrowdStrike said.

Couldn't it, though? 🤔

And CrowdStrike said it also plans to move to a staggered approach to releasing content updates so that not everyone receives the same update at once, and to give customers more fine-grained control over when the updates are installed.

I thought they were already supposed to be doing this?

The fact that they weren’t already doing staggered releases is mind-boggling. I work for a company with a minuscule fraction of CrowdStrike’s user base / value, and even we do staggered releases.
- They do have staggered releases, but it's a bit more complicated. The client that you run does have versioning and you can choose to lag behind the current build, but this was a bad definition update. Most people want the latest definition to protect themselves from zero days. The whole thing is complicated and a but wonky, but the real issue here is cloudflare's kernel driver not validating the content of the definition before loading it.
Couldn't it, though? 🤔
IANAD and AFAIU, not in kernel mode. Things like trying to read non existing memory in kernel mode are supposed to crash the system because continuing could be worse.
- I.meant couldn't they test for a NULL pointer.
The company routinely tests its software updates before pushing them out to customers, CrowdStrike said in the report. But on July 19, a bug in CrowdStrike’s cloud-based testing system — specifically, the part that runs validation checks on new updates prior to release — ended up allowing the software to be pushed out “despite containing problematic content data.”
It is time to write tests for tests!
- My thoughts are to have a set of machines that have to run the update for a while, and if any single machine doesn't pass and all allow it to move forward, it halts any further rollout.
a bug in CrowdStrike’s cloud-based testing system
Always blame the tests. There are so many dark patterns in this industry including blaming qa for being the last group to touch a release, that I never believe “it’s the tests”.
There’s usually something more systemic going on where something like this is missed by project management and developers, or maybe they have a blind spot that it will never happen, or maybe there’s a lack of communication or planning, or maybe they outsourced testing to the cheapest offshore providers, or maybe everyone has huge time pressure, but “it’s the tests”
Ok, maybe I’m not impartial, but when I’m doing a root cause on how something like this got out, my employer expects a better answer than “it’s the tests”
- There was probably one dude at CrowdStrike going. Uh hey guys??? 😆

Oh, finally, I have been waiting for so long.

All because of one guy!!!!

Executives dindu nuffin mate

And the stockades?

Any word on the stockades?

George Kurtz has only crashed the world twice so he has one strike to go, I guess.
- You can only fail upwards at the executive level. He went from CTO to CEO on his last global crash. What's next? Running for President?
  No risk, All rewards.
- Wowowow! This is insane! 😨🤯

This crowdstrike stuff seems an expensive subscription

I saw a lot of photos of crashed ad screens.

Why the hell are corps paying this much money for windows+cloudstrike for a glorified digital picture frame?? Wouldn't be 100x cheaper to do it with some embedded stuff instead of having a full desktop computer running a full desktop os????

Yeah, an RPi or similar with a screen would be more than plenty for this, and the Pi Zero is really small. Connect that to a central Linux server with a hot backup or two (through local DNS) and you'll have a hard time crashing it.

For the rest of history this sort of thing will mention Crowdstrike, or it might even be called a "crowdstrike."

You can't buy that kind of marketing

Ok. Can we get a solar storm next? I want linux servers out this time too.

Best I can do is an xz vuln where half the Linux servers go down for maintenance.

Do we actually know? We might know that Crowdstrike was the cause but we don't actually know what went wrong and how it happened. It is an unfree proprietary closed source software, we just have to take their word for it, which for all purposes is PR in line with the fact that it is coming from a profit-driven organisation.

this is exactly the question that needs answering... the PIR is bullshit

Beautiful

Pretty soon we are gonna have to start deciding if it's safer for enterprise computers to run without AV or AMP.