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

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

182 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] 51 points 3 months ago (5 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago

the smart ones probably do

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Peak programmer humor

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

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 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.