Technology

59299 readers

4547 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

829

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

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

This is a pretty hot take. A single bad file can topple pretty much any operating system depending on what the file is. That's part of why it's important to be able to detect file corruption in a mission critical system.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

This was a binary configuration file of some sort though?

Something along the lines of:

IF (config.parameter.read == garbage) {
     Dont_panic;
}

Would have helped greatly here.

Edit: oh it's more like an unsigned binary blob that gets downloaded and directly executed. What could possibly go wrong with that approach?

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

We agree, but they were responding to “windows apparently has zero execution integrity”.