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

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is a pretty hot take. A single bad file can topple pretty much any operating system depending on what the file is. That's part of why it's important to be able to detect file corruption in a mission critical system.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

This was a binary configuration file of some sort though?

Something along the lines of:

IF (config.parameter.read == garbage) {
     Dont_panic;
}

Would have helped greatly here.

Edit: oh it's more like an unsigned binary blob that gets downloaded and directly executed. What could possibly go wrong with that approach?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

We agree, but they were responding to “windows apparently has zero execution integrity”.