this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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here's a good overview of what happened https://www.thestack.technology/crowstrike-null-pointer-blamed-rca/
Lit, I've been waiting for this.
Edit: That's mostly a high-level overview. Do you have some actual reverse-engineering you can point me to?
It's a proprietary enterprise security product so I think it'll be difficult to get information until they give a proper post-mortem (if they do so). Here's hoping someone can put it all together though.
From what we have from CrowdStrike so far, the Channel File 291 update was to combat some use of Named Pipes in Windows malware.
This seems to have triggered a null pointer exception in the Falcon kernel driver as it loaded this Channel File. CrowdStrike say this is not related to the large null sections of one of the files but haven't really explained what did trigger it.
Regardless, the kernel driver ought to have been statically analysed to detect this kind of memory hazard, or written in a language that prevents this class of bugs altogether. This is a priority of the US government right now, but CrowdStrike doesn't seem to have got the memo.