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CrowdStrike downtime apparently caused by update that replaced a file with 42kb of zeroes (twiiit.com)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/technology

190 comments fedilink hide all child comments

…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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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I agree that the code is probably poor but I doubt it was a conscious decision to crash the OS.

The code is probably just:

Load config data
Do something with data

And 2 fails unexpectedly because the data is garbage and wasn't checked if it's valid.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

You can still catch the error at runtime and do something appropriate. That might be to say this update might have been tampered with and refuse to boot, but more likely it'd be to just send an error report back to the developers that an unexpected condition is being hit and just continuing without loading that one faulty definition file.

[–] CeeBee_Eh 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If there's an error, use last known good config. So many systems do this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Unfortunately, an OS that covers such cases is a lost monetization opportunity, fuck the system, use a Linux distro, you get the idea. Microsoft makes money off of tech support for people too unversed in computers to fix it themselves.