How can all of those zeroes cause a major OS crash?
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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The file is used to store values to use as denominators on some divisions down the process. Being all zeros is caused a division by zero erro. Pretty rookie mistake, you should do IFERROR(;0) when using divisions to avoid thay.
I disagree. I'd rather things crash than silently succeed or change the computation. They should have done better input and output validation, and gracefully fail into a recoverable state that sends a message to an admin to correct. A divide by zero doesn't crash a system, it's a recoverable error they should 100% detect and handle, hot sweep under the rug.
Life pro tip: if you're a python programmer you should use try: func() except: continue every time you run a function, that way ypu would never have errors on your code.
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If I send you on stage at the Olympic Games opening ceremony with a sealed envelope
And I say "This contains your script, just open it and read it"
And then when you open it, the script is blank
You're gonna freak out
Maybe. But I'd like to think I'd just say something clever like, "says here that this year the pummel horse will be replaced by yours truly!"
Problem is that software cannot deal with unexpected situations like a human brain can. Computers do exactly what a programmer tells it to do, nothing more nothing less. So if a situation arises that the programmer hasn't written code for, then there will be a crash.
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I'm gonna take from this that we should have AI doing disaster recovery on all deployments. Tech CEO's have been hyping AI up so much, what could possibly go wrong?
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Great layman's explanation.
Ah, makes sense. I guess a driver would completely freak out if that file gave no instructions and was just like "..."
You would think that Microsoft would implement some basic error handing.
That's what the BSOD is. It tries to bring the system back to a nice safe freshly-booted state where e.g. the fans are running and the GPU is not happily drawing several kilowatts and trying to catch fire.
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For most things, yes. But if someone were to compromise the file, stopping when they see it invalid is probably a good idea for security
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Because it's supposed to be something else
Well, you see, the front fell off.
Windows
If I had to bet my money, a bad machine with corrupted memory pushed the file at a very final stage of the release.
The astonishing fact is that for a security software I would expect all files being verified against a signature (that would have prevented this issue and some kinds of attacks
Which is still unacceptable.
Windows kernel drivers are signed by Microsoft. They must have rubber stamped this for this to go through, though.
What about the Mac and Linux PCs? Did Microsoft sign those too?
only the Windows version was affected
Not sure about Mac, but on Linux, they're signed by the distro maintainer or with the computer's secure boot key.
So... Microsoft couldn't have "rubber-stamped" anything to do with the outage.
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This was not the driver, it was a config file or something read by the driver. Now having a driver in kernel space depending on a config on a regular path is another fuck up
Which is still unacceptable.
So here's my uneducated question: Don't huge software companies like this usually do updates in "rollouts" to a small portion of users (companies) at a time?
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have they ruled out any possibility of a man in the middle attack by a foreign actor?
This was not a cyberattack.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/statement-on-falcon-content-update-for-windows-hosts/
I guess they could be lying, but if they were lying, I don’t know if their argument of “we’re incompetent” is instilling more trust in them.
"We are confident that only our engineers can fuck up so much, instead of our competitors"
Or it being an intentional proof of concept
In the middle of the download path of all the machines that got the update?
The CEO made a statement to the effect of "It's not an attack, it's just me and my company being shockingly incompetent." He didn't use exactly those words but that was the gist.
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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
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.
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Where's my fuckin raise
Don't Google solar winds
Oooooooo this one again thank you for reminding me
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I'd assume state (or other serious) actors already know about these companies.
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d'00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
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