We finally know what caused the global tech outage - and how much it cost
We finally know what caused the global tech outage - and how much it cost
Insurers have begun calculating the financial damage caused by last week’s devastating CrowdStrike software glitch that crashed computers, canceled flights and disrupted hospitals all around the globe — and the picture isn’t pretty.
"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."
Hol up. So they like still get to exist? Microsoft and affected industries just gonna kinda move past this?
Haven't seen anything from the affected major players. Obviously Crowdstrike isn't going to say they are fucked long term, they have to act like this is just a little hiccup and move on. Lawsuits are absolutely incoming
We'll see how fucked they are from SLA breaches/etc., and then we'll see how many companies jump ship to an alternative. We won't have the real fallout from this event for months or years.
Newsflash, Solarwinds still exists too. Not sure I could name a company that screwed up so big and actually paid the price.
I wasn't effected but I bet a lot of admins, as pissed as they were, were thinking "I could easily fuck up this bad or worse".
Yeah, what's the jokey parable thing?
A CTO is at lunch when a call comes in. There's been a huge outage, caused by a low level employee pressing the wrong button.
"Damn, you going to fire that guy?"
"Hell no, do you know how much I just spent on training him to never do that again?"(</Blah>)
$5.4 Bn so far, not including lost worker productivity or damage to brand reputations, so that's a very conservative estimate. And Cybersecurity insurance will supposedly only cover up to 20% of that (but good luck getting even that much). What a clusterf***
And that $5,400,000,000 loss estimate is only Fortune 500 companies!
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?
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.
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.
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.”
It is time to write tests for tests!
My thoughts are to have a set of machines that have to run the update for a while, and if any single machine doesn't pass and all allow it to move forward, it halts any further rollout.
a bug in CrowdStrike’s cloud-based testing system
Always blame the tests. There are so many dark patterns in this industry including blaming qa for being the last group to touch a release, that I never believe “it’s the tests”.
There’s usually something more systemic going on where something like this is missed by project management and developers, or maybe they have a blind spot that it will never happen, or maybe there’s a lack of communication or planning, or maybe they outsourced testing to the cheapest offshore providers, or maybe everyone has huge time pressure, but “it’s the tests”
Ok, maybe I’m not impartial, but when I’m doing a root cause on how something like this got out, my employer expects a better answer than “it’s the tests”
There was probably one dude at CrowdStrike going. Uh hey guys??? 😆
Oh, finally, I have been waiting for so long.
And the stockades?
Any word on the stockades?
George Kurtz has only crashed the world twice so he has one strike to go, I guess.
This crowdstrike stuff seems an expensive subscription
I saw a lot of photos of crashed ad screens.
Why the hell are corps paying this much money for windows+cloudstrike for a glorified digital picture frame?? Wouldn't be 100x cheaper to do it with some embedded stuff instead of having a full desktop computer running a full desktop os????
Yeah, an RPi or similar with a screen would be more than plenty for this, and the Pi Zero is really small. Connect that to a central Linux server with a hot backup or two (through local DNS) and you'll have a hard time crashing it.
For the rest of history this sort of thing will mention Crowdstrike, or it might even be called a "crowdstrike."
You can't buy that kind of marketing
Ok. Can we get a solar storm next? I want linux servers out this time too.
Best I can do is an xz vuln where half the Linux servers go down for maintenance.
Do we actually know? We might know that Crowdstrike was the cause but we don't actually know what went wrong and how it happened. It is an unfree proprietary closed source software, we just have to take their word for it, which for all purposes is PR in line with the fact that it is coming from a profit-driven organisation.
this is exactly the question that needs answering... the PIR is bullshit
Beautiful
Pretty soon we are gonna have to start deciding if it's safer for enterprise computers to run without AV or AMP.