this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
233 points (99.2% liked)

World News

39210 readers
2056 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Microsoft says it estimates that 8.5m computers around the world were disabled by the global IT outage.

It’s the first time a figure has been put on the incident and suggests it could be the worst cyber event in history.

The glitch came from a security company called CrowdStrike which sent out a corrupted software update to its huge number of customers.

Microsoft, which is helping customers recover said in a blog post: "We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] markr@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

There are a lot of misunderstandings about what happened. First, the ‘update’ was to a data file used by the crowdstrike kernel components (specifically ‘falcon’.) while this file has a ‘.sys’ name, it is not a driver, it provides threat definition data. It is read by the falcon driver(s), not loaded as an executable.

Microsoft doesn’t update this file, crowdstrike user mode services do that, and they do that very frequently as part of their real-time threat detection and mitigation.

The updates are essential. There is no opportunity for IT to manage or test these updates other than blocking them via external firewalls.

The falcon kernel components apparently do not protect against a corrupted data file, or the corruption in this case evaded that protection. This is such an obvious vulnerability that i am leaning toward a deliberate manipulation of the data file to exploit a discovered vulnerability in their handling of a malformed data file. I have no evidence for that other than resilience against malformed data input is very basic software engineering and crowdstrike is a very sophisticated system.

I’m more interested in how the file got corrupted before distribution.

[–] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, how the hell did this failure pass testing, is what I want to know!

[–] lechatron 4 points 4 months ago

That's the neat thing, Crowdstrike bypassed the rigorous testing process to get Kernel software updates signed by Microsoft by having the part that was tested and signed by Microsoft load another update file. Still unclear how Crowdstrike missed it before releasing it though.

This is a pretty good break down of what happened by a retired windows dev. Including how software operates between Kernel and user zones. The break down of what he thinks happened is about 6:40.