Technology

59589 readers

3148 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

830

CrowdStrike downtime apparently caused by update that replaced a file with 42kb of zeroes (twiiit.com)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

190 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

[–] Socsa@sh.itjust.works 37 points 4 months ago (19 children)

The fact that a single bad file can cause a kernel panic like this tells you everything you need to know about using this kind of integrated security product. Crowdstrike is apparently a rootkit, and windows apparently has zero execution integrity.

[–] areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 23 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Yeah pretty much all security products need kernel level access unfortunately. The Linux ones including crowdstrike and also the Open Source tools SELinux and AppArmor all need some kind of kernel module in order to work.

[–] reddithalation@sopuli.xyz 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

crowdstrike has caused issues like this with linux systems in the past, but sounds like they have now moved to eBPF user mode by default (I don't know enough about low level linux to understand that though haha), and it now can't crash the whole computer. source

[–] areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 6 points 4 months ago

As explained in that source eBPF code is still running in kernel space. The difference is it's not turing complete and has protections in place to make sure it can't do anything too nasty. That being said I am sure you could still break something like networking or critical services on the system by applying the wrong eBPF code. It's on the authors of the software to make sure they thoroughly test and review their software prior to release if it's designed to work with the kernel especially in enterprise environments. I am glad this is something they are doing though.

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (16 replies)