this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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8
CrowdStrike downtime apparently caused by update that replaced a file with 42kb of zeroes (twiiit.com)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
44 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] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

If I had to bet my money, a bad machine with corrupted memory pushed the file at a very final stage of the release.

The astonishing fact is that for a security software I would expect all files being verified against a signature (that would have prevented this issue and some kinds of attacks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 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] 1 points 4 months ago

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] 0 points 4 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] 1 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

From my experience it was more likely to be an accidental overwrite from human error with recent policy changes that removed vetting steps.