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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

…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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[-] diffusive@lemmy.world 151 points 5 months ago

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

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 51 points 5 months ago

Which is still unacceptable.

[-] BossDj@lemm.ee 50 points 5 months ago

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?

[-] Dashi@lemmy.world 34 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] madcaesar@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] umbrella@lemmy.ml 28 points 5 months ago

the smart ones probably do

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 11 points 5 months ago

Companies don't like to be beta testers. Apparently the solution is to just not test anything and call it production ready.

[-] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 14 points 5 months ago

Every company has a full-scale test environment. Some companies are just lucky enough to have a separate prod environment.

[-] Norgoroth@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago
[-] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 4 points 5 months ago

I'm a bit rusty. I'd give it a C++.

[-] expr@programming.dev 5 points 5 months ago

That's certainly what we do in my workplace. Shocked that they don't.

[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 2 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 16 points 5 months ago

Windows kernel drivers are signed by Microsoft. They must have rubber stamped this for this to go through, though.

[-] diffusive@lemmy.world 72 points 5 months ago

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

[-] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 7 points 5 months ago
[-] Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] Angry_Autist@lemmy.world 14 points 5 months ago

From my experience it was more likely to be an accidental overwrite from human error with recent policy changes that removed vetting steps.

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today -1 points 5 months ago

Which is still unacceptable.

this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
823 points (98.5% liked)

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