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CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

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Re: CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

#921

This might be a good time for folks to go back and watch the first episode of James Burke's Connections: The Trigger Effect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOb3Dilzjc Interconnected systems can fail spectacularly in unforeseen ways. Strange that something so obvious is so often dismissed or overlooked.

Except this is not that, good and known practices exist against these kind of fails, and are used by others.

Re: CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

#922

Some Canonical guy I think many years ago mentioned this as their sales strategy a few year ago after a particularly nasty Windows outage: We don't ask customers to switch all systems from Windows to Ubuntu, but to consider moving maybe a third to Ubuntu so they won't sit completely helpless next time Windows fail spectacularly. While I see more and more Ubuntu systems, and recently have even spotted Landscape in the…

Canonical in particular are no better, they do the exact same thing with that aberration called snap. They have brought entire clusters down before with automatic updates.

Re: CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

#923
All: there are over 3000 comments in this thread. If you want to read them all, click More at the bottom of each page, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002195&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002195&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002195&p=4 (...etc.)

Re: CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

#924

Wow, this hits close to home. Doing a page fault where you can't in the kernel is exactly what I did with my very first patch I submitted after I joined the Microsoft BitLocker team in 2009. I added a check on the driver initialization path and didn't annotate the code as non-paged because frankly I didn't know at the time that the Windows kernel was paged. All my kernel development experience up to that point was wi…

I'm completely ignorant on the topic but isn't rebooting a default test for kernel code, given how sensitive it is?

Re: CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

#925

SMB here. Just spent a nine hour day fixing this. We had two machines that after a couple of reboots just came back up fine. We were trialing CrowdStrike and about to purchase next week. If their rep doesn't offer us at least half off, we are going with Sentinel One which was half the price of CS already. The incompetence that allowed this is baffling to me. I assumed with their billions of dollars they'd have tiers…

It is baffling to me that you are still considering them.

Re: CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

#926

Wow, this hits close to home. Doing a page fault where you can't in the kernel is exactly what I did with my very first patch I submitted after I joined the Microsoft BitLocker team in 2009. I added a check on the driver initialization path and didn't annotate the code as non-paged because frankly I didn't know at the time that the Windows kernel was paged. All my kernel development experience up to that point was wi…

I do not mean this to be blamey in any way shape or form and am asking only about the process:

Shouldn’t that have been caught in code review?

Re: CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

#928

Took down our entire emergency department as we were treating a heart attack. 911 down for our state too. Nowhere for people to be diverted to because the other nearby hospitals are down. Hard to imagine how many millions of not billions of dollars this one bad update caused.

> Took down our entire emergency department as we were treating a heart attack.

It makes my blood boil to be honest that there is no liability for what software has become. It's just not acceptable.

Companies that produce software with the level of access that Crowdstrike has (for all effective purposes a remote root exploit vector) must be liable for the damages that this access can cause.

This would radically change how much attention they pay to quality control. Today they can just YOLO-push barely tested code that bricks large parts of the economy and face no consequences. (Oh, I'm sure there will be some congress testimony and associated circus, but they will not ever pay for the damages they caused today.)

If a person caused the level and quantity of damage Crowdstrike caused today they would be in jail for life. But a company like Crowdstrike will merrily go on doing more damage without paying any consequence.

Re: CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

#929
This is why I don't like fully automatic updates. I prefer having control over the "deploy" button for the ability to time it when I can tolerate downtime. In mission-critical production systems all updates should go through test staging pipelines that my team controls, not a vendor.

Broken updates have cause far more havoc than being a few hours or even days late on a so-called critical patch.

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