…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.
Every affected company should be extremely thankful that this was an accidental bug, because if crowdstrike gets hacked, it means the bad actors could basically ransom I don’t know how many millions of computers overnight
Not to mention that crowdstrike will now be a massive target from hackers trying to do exactly this
Don’t Google solar winds
Holy hell
New vulnerability just dropped
Oooooooo this one again thank you for reminding me
That one turns out to have been largely Microsoft’s fault for repeatedly ignoring warnings of a severe vulnerability relating to Active Directory. Microsoft were warned about it, acknowledged it and ignored it for years until it got used in the Solar Winds hack.
lesson not learned
security as a service is about to cost the world a pretty penny.
You mean it’s going to cost corporations a pretty penny. Which means they’ll pass those “costs of operation” on to the rest of us. Fuck.
well, the world does include the rest of us.
and its not just opeerational costs. what happens when an outage lasts 3+ days and affects all communication and travel? thats another massive shock to the system.
they come faster and faster.
Either that or cyber instance
Where’s my fuckin raise
All the more reason for companies to ignore security until they’re affected personally. The companies I’ve worked for barely ever invested in future cost-savings.
On Monday I will once again be raising the point of not automatically updating software. Just because it’s being updated does not mean it’s better and does not mean we should be running it on production servers.
Of course they won’t listen to me but at least it’s been brought up.
Thank God someone else said it. I was constantly in an existential battle with IT at my last job when they were constantly forcing updates, many of which did actually break systems we rely on because Apple loves introducing breaking changes in OS updates (like completely fucking up how dynamic libraries work).
Updates should be vetted. It’s a pain in the ass to do because companies never provide an easy way to rollback, but this really should be standard practice.
You can use AirWatch to deal with Apple devices. Although it is a clunky program it does at least give you the ability to roll things back.
I thought it was a security definition download; as in, there’s nothing short of not connecting to the Internet that you can do about it.
Well I haven’t looked into it for this piece of software but essentially you can prevent automatic updates from applying to the network. Usually because the network is behind a firewall that you can use to block the update until you decide that you like it.
Also a lot of companies recognize that businesses like to check updates and so have more streamlined ways of doing it. For instance Apple have a whole dedicated update system for iOS devices that only businesses have access to where you can decide you don’t want the latest iOS and it’s easy you just don’t enable it and it doesn’t happen.
Regardless of the method, what should happen is you should download the update to a few testing computers (preferably also physically isolated from the main network) and run some basic checks to see if it works. In this case the testing computers would have blue screened instantly, and you would have known that this is not an update that you want on your system. Although usually requires a little bit more investigation to determine problems.
It makes me so fuckdamn angry that people make this assumption.
This Crowdstrike update was NOT pausable. You cannot disable updates without disabling the service as they get fingerprint files nearly every day.
I hear you, but there’s no reason to be angry.
When I first learned of the issue, my first thought was, “Hey our update policy doesn’t pull the latest sensor to production servers.” After a little more research I came to the same conclusion you did, aside from disconnecting from the internet there’s nothing we really could have done.
There will always be armchair quarterbacks, use this as an opportunity to teach, life’s too short to be upset about such things.
It doesn’t help that I’m medically angry 80% of the time for mostly no reason, but even without that this would incense me because I’ve had 40+ users shouting similar uneducated BS at me yesterday thinking that it was personally my fault that 40% of the world bluescreened. No I am not exaggerating.
I have written and spoken phrases ‘No we could not prevent this update’ so many times in the last 24 hours that they have become meaningless to me through semantic satiation.
Take it from me, reality is a prison. If your issues are as bad as mine, escapism is the only solution and social media is the polar opposite of escapism. I’m not saying “do drugs”, I’m saying “threaten to quit, and if they call your bluff, make an untraceable alteration to fuck the company over and quietly hand in your resignation” before taking a break to indulge hobbies while searching for another job.
And if you can’t afford to lose your job at all for any length, you now have a morally-acceptable reason to kill everyone in your workplace because better death than slavery to a system this corrupt.
I’ve got a feeling crowdstrike won’t be as grand of target anymore. They’re sure to lose a lot of clients…at least until they spin up a new name and erease all traces of “crowdstrike”.
I don’t think they will lose any big clients. I am sure they will have insurance to take care of compensations.
That trick doesn’t work for B2B as organizations tend to do their research before buying. Consumers tend not to.
Third parties being able to push updates to production machines without being tested first is giant red flag for me. We’re human … we fuck up. I understand that. But that’s why you test things first.
I don’t trust myself without double checking, so why would we completely trust a third party so completely.
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This is why I openly advocate for a diverse ecosystems of services, so not everyone is affected if the biggest gets targeted.
But unfortunately, capitalism favors only the frontrunner and everyone else can go spin, and we aren’t getting rid of capitalism anytime soon.
So basically, it is inevitable that crowdstrike WILL be hacked, and the next time will be much much worse.
Years ago I read an study about insurance companies and diversification of assets in Brazil. By regulation, an individual insurance company need to have a diversified investment portfolio, but the insurance market as a whole not. the diversification of every individual company sum, as a whole of all the insurance market, as an was exposed market, and the researchers found, iirc, like 3 banks that if they fail they can cause a chain reaction that would take out the entire insurance market.
Don’t know why, but your comment made me remind of that.
That’s kind of fascinating, never considered what the results of that kind of regulation can bring without anyone even noticing it at the time. Thanks for a good reading topic for lunch!
I’d assume state (or other serious) actors already know about these companies.
Yeah the fact that this company calls it feature that they can push an update anytime without site level intervention is scary to me. If they ever did get compromised boom every device running their program suddenly has a kernel level malware essentially overnight.