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We finally know what caused the global tech outage - and how much it cost (www.cnn.com)

submitted 4 months ago by WhatsHerBucket to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (10 children)

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?

[–] whatwhatwhatwhat 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] foggenbooty 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] whatwhatwhatwhat 2 points 4 months ago

Makes sense that it was a definitions update that caused this, and I get why that’s not something you’d want to lag behind on like you could with the agent. (Putting aside that one of the selling points of next-gen AV/EDR tools is that they’re less reliant on definitions updates compared to traditional AV.) It’s just a bit wild that there isn’t more testing in place.

It’s like we’re always walking this fine line between “security at all costs” vs “stability, convenience, etc”. By pushing definitions as quickly as possible, you improve security, but you’re taking some level of risk too. In some alternate universe, CS didn’t push definitions quickly enough, and a bunch of companies got hit with a zero-day. I’d say it’s an impossible situation sometimes, but if I had to choose between outage or data breach, I’m choosing outage every time.

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