- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
All our servers and company laptops went down at pretty much the same time. Laptops have been bootlooping to blue screen of death. It’s all very exciting, personally, as someone not responsible for fixing it.
Apparently caused by a bad CrowdStrike update.
Edit: now being told we (who almost all generally work from home) need to come into the office Monday as they can only apply the fix in-person. We’ll see if that changes over the weekend…
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Reading into the updates some more… I’m starting to think this might just destroy CloudStrike as a company altogether. Between the mountain of lawsuits almost certainly incoming and the total destruction of any public trust in the company, I don’t see how they survive this. Just absolutely catastrophic on all fronts.
If all the computers stuck in boot loop can’t be recovered… yeah, that’s a lot of cost for a lot of businesses. Add to that all the immediate impact of missed flights and who knows what happening at the hospitals. Nightmare scenario if you’re responsible for it.
This sort of thing is exactly why you push updates to groups in stages, not to everything all at once.
Looks like the laptops are able to be recovered with a bit of finagling, so fortunately they haven’t bricked everything.
And yeah staged updates or even just… some testing? Not sure how this one slipped through.
Not sure how this one slipped through.
I’d bet my ass this was caused by terrible practices brought on by suits demanding more “efficient” releases.
“Why do we do so much testing before releases? Have we ever had any problems before? We’re wasting so much time that I might not even be able to buy another yacht this year”
At least nothing like this happens in the airline industry
Certainly not! Or other industries for that matter. It’s a good thing executives everywhere aren’t just concentrating on squeezing the maximum amount of money out of their companies and funneling it to themselves and their buddies on the board.
Sure, let’s “rightsize” the company by firing 20% of our workforce (but not management!) and raise prices 30%, and demand that the remaining employees maintain productivity at the level it used to be before we fucked things up. Oh and no raises for the plebs, we can’t afford it. Maybe a pizza party? One slice per employee though.
One of my coworkers, while waiting on hold for 3+ hours with our company’s outsourced helpdesk, noticed after booting into safe mode that the Crowdstrike update had triggered a snapshot that she was able to roll back to and get back on her laptop. So at least that’s a potential solution.
Agreed, this will probably kill them over the next few years unless they can really magic up something.
They probably don’t get sued - their contracts will have indemnity clauses against exactly this kind of thing, so unless they seriously misrepresented what their product does, this probably isn’t a contract breach.
If you are running crowdstrike, it’s probably because you have some regulatory obligations and an auditor to appease - you aren’t going to be able to just turn it off overnight, but I’m sure there are going to be some pretty awkward meetings when it comes to contract renewals in the next year, and I can’t imagine them seeing much growth
Nah. This has happened with every major corporate antivirus product. Multiple times. And the top IT people advising on purchasing decisions know this.
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At my old shop we still had people giving money to checkpoint and splunk, despite numerous problems and a huge cost, because they had favourites.
Don’t most indemnity clauses have exceptions for gross negligence? Pushing out an update this destructive without it getting caught by any quality control checks sure seems grossly negligent.
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explain to the project manager with crayons why you shouldn’t do this
Can’t; the project manager ate all the crayons
Why is it bad to do on a Friday? Based on your last paragraph, I would have thought Friday is probably the best week day to do it.
Most companies, mine included, try to roll out updates during the middle or start of a week. That way if there are issues the full team is available to address them.
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And hence the term read-only Friday.
rolling out an update to production that there was clearly no testing
Or someone selected “env2” instead of “env1” (#cattleNotPets names) and tested in prod by mistake.
Look, it’s a gaffe and someone’s fired. But it doesn’t mean fuck ups are endemic.
Was it not possible for MS to design their safe mode to still “work” when Bitlocker was enabled? Seems strange.
I’m not sure what you’d expect to be able to do in a safe mode with no disk access.
I think you’re on the nose, here. I laughed at the headline, but the more I read the more I see how fucked they are. Airlines. Industrial plants. Fucking governments. This one is big in a way that will likely get used as a case study.
The London Stock Exchange went down. They’re fukd.
Yeah saw that several steel mills have been bricked by this, that’s months and millions to restart
Got a link? I find it hard to believe that a process like that would stop because of a few windows machines not booting.
a few windows machines with controller application installed
That’s the real kicker.
Those machines should be airgapped and no need to run Crowdstrike on them. If the process controller machines of a steel mill are connected to the internet and installing auto updates then there really is no hope for this world.
But daddy microshoft says i gotta connect the system to the internet uwu
No, regulatory auditors have boxes that need checking, regardless of the reality of the technical infrastructure.
I work in an environment where the workstations aren’t on the Internet there’s a separate network, there’s still a need for antivirus and we were hit with bsod yesterday
There is no unsafer place than isolated network. AV and xdr is not optional in industry/healthcare etc.
then there really is no hope for this world.
I don’t know how to tell you this, but…
There are a lot of heavy manufacturing tools that are controlled and have their interface handled by Windows under the hood.
They’re not all networked, and some are super old, but a more modernized facility could easily be using a more modern version of Windows and be networked to have flow of materials, etc more tightly integrated into their systems.
The higher precision your operation, the more useful having much more advanced logs, networked to a central system, becomes in tracking quality control.
Imagine if after the fact, you could track a set of .1% of batches that are failing more often and look at the per second logs of temperature they were at during the process, and see that there’s 1° temperature variance between the 30th to 40th minute that wasn’t experienced by the rest of your batches. (Obviously that’s nonsense because I don’t know anything about the actual process of steel manufacturing. But I do know that there’s a lot of industrial manufacturing tooling that’s an application on top of windows, and the higher precision your output needs to be, the more useful it is to have high quality data every step of the way.)
Testing in production will do that
Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a seperate testing environment, you know? Manglement has to cut cost somewhere.
Manglement is the good term lmao
Don’t we blame MS at least as much? How does MS let an update like this push through their Windows Update system? How does an application update make the whole OS unable to boot? Blue screens on Windows have been around for decades, why don’t we have a better recovery system?
Crowdstrike runs at ring 0, effectively as part of the kernel. Like a device driver. There are no safeguards at that level. Extreme testing and diligence is required, because these are the consequences for getting it wrong. This is entirely on crowdstrike.
This didn’t go through Windows Update. It went through the ctowdstrike software directly.
What lawsuits do you think are going to happen?
They can have all the clauses they like but pulling something like this off requires a certain amount of gross negligence that they can almost certainly be held liable for.
Whatever you say my man. It’s not like they go through very specific SLA conversations and negotiations to cover this or anything like that.
I forgot that only people you have agreements with can sue you. This is why Boeing hasn’t been sued once recently for their own criminal negligence.
👌👍
😔💦🦅🥰🥳
Forget lawsuits, they’re going to be in front of congress for this one
For what? At best it would be a hearing on the challenges of national security with industry.
The amount of servers running Windows out there is depressing to me
The four multinational corporations I worked at were almost entirely Windows servers with the exception of vendor specific stuff running Linux. Companies REALLY want that support clause in their infrastructure agreement.
I’ve worked as an IT architect at various companies in my career and you can definitely get support contracts for engineering support of RHEL, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc. That isn’t the issue. The issue is that there are a lot of system administrators with “15 years experience in Linux” that have no real experience in Linux. They have experience googling for guides and tutorials while having cobbled together documents of doing various things without understanding what they are really doing.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an enterprise patch their Linux solutions (if they patched them at all with some ridiculous rubberstamped PO&AM) manually without deploying a repo and updating the repo treating it as you would a WSUS. Hell, I’m pleasantly surprised if I see them joined to a Windows domain (a few times) or an LDAP (once but they didn’t have a trust with the Domain Forest or use sudoer rules…sigh).
The issue is that there are a lot of system administrators with “15 years experience in Linux” that have no real experience in Linux.
Reminds me of this guy I helped a few years ago. His name was Bob, and he was a sysadmin at a predominantly Windows company. The software I was supporting, however, only ran on Linux. So since Bob had been a UNIX admin back in the 80s they picked him to install the software.
But it had been 30 years since he ever touched a CLI. Every time I got on a call with him, I’d have to give him every keystroke one by one, all while listening to him complain about how much he hated it. After three or four calls I just gave up and used the screenshare to do everything myself.
AFAIK he’s still the only Linux “sysadmin” there.
“googling answers”, I feel personally violated.
/s
To be fare, there is not reason to memorize things that you need once or twice. Google is tool, and good for Linux issues. Why debug some issue for few hours, if you can Google resolution in minutes.
I’m not against using Google, stack exhange, man pages, apropos, tldr, etc. but if you’re trying to advertise competence with a skillset but you can’t do the basics and frankly it is still essentially a mystery to you then youre just being dishonest. Sure use all tools available to you though because that’s a good thing to do.
Just because someone breathed air in the same space occasionally over the years where a tool exists does not mean that they can honestly say that those are years of experience with it on a resume or whatever.
Just because someone breathed air in the same space occasionally over the years where a tool exists does not mean that they can honestly say that those are years of experience with it on a resume or whatever.
Capitalism makes them to.
Agreed. If you are not incompetent, you will remember the stuff that you use often. You will know exactly where to look to refresh your memory for things you use infrequently, and when you do need to look something up, you will understand the solution and why it’s correct. Being good at looking things up, is like half the job.
Companies REALLY want that support clause in their infrastructure agreement.
RedHat, Ubuntu, SUSE - they all exist on support contracts.
I dunno, but doesn’t like a quarter of the internet kinda run on Azure?
so 40% of azure crashes a quarter of the internet…
I guess Spotify was running on the other 40%, as many other services
doesn’t like a quarter of the internet kinda run on Azure?
Said another way, 3/4 of the internet isn’t on Unsure cloud blah-blah.
And azure is - shhh - at least partially backed by Linux hosts. Didn’t they buy an AWS clone and forcibly inject it with money like Bobby Brown on a date in the hopes of building AWS better than AWS like they did with nokia? MS could be more protectively diverse than many of its best customers.
Where did you think Microsoft was getting all (hyperbole) of their money from?
I know i was really surprised how many there are. But honestly think of how many companies are using active directory and azure
>Make a kernel-level antivirus
>Make it proprietary
>Don’t test updates… for some reason??never do updates on a Friday.
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And especially now the work week has slimmed down where no one works on Friday anymore
Excuse me, what now? I didn’t get that memo.
Yeah it’s great :-) 4 10hr shifts and every weekend is a 3 day weekend
Is the 4x10 really worth the extra day off? Tbh I’m not sure it would work very well for me… I find just one 10-hour day to be kinda draining, so doing that 4 times a week every week feels like it might just cancel out any benefits of the extra day off.
I am very used to it so I don’t find it draining. I tried 5x8 once and it felt more like working an extra day than getting more time in the afternoon. If that makes sense. I also start early around 7am, so I am only staying a little later than other people
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I changed jobs because the new management was all “if I can’t look at your ass you don’t work here” and I agreed.
I now work remotely 100% and it’s in the union contract with the 21vacation days and 9x9 compressed time and regular raises. The view out my home office window is partially obscured by a floofy cat and we both like it that way.
I’d work here until I die.
Actually I was not even joking. I also work in IT and have exactly the same opinion. Friday is for easy stuff!
Never update unless something is broken.
This is fine as long as you politely ask everyone on the Internet to slow down and stop exploiting new vulnerabilities.
I think vulnerabilities found count as “something broken” and chap you replied to simply did not think that far ahead hahah
For real - A cyber security company should basically always be pushing out updates.
Exactly. You don’t know what the vulnerabilities are, but the vendors pushing out updates typically do. So stay on top of updates to limit the attack surface.
Major releases can wait, security updates should be pushed as soon as they can be proven to not break prod.
always pushing out updates
Notes: Version bump: Eric is a twat so I removed his name from the listed coder team members on the about window.
git push --force
leans back in chair productive day, productive day indeed
git commit -am "Fixed" && git push --force
That’s advice so smart you’re guaranteed to have massive security holes.
BTW, I use Arch.
If it was Arch you’d update once every 15 minutes whether anything’s broken or not.
I use Tumbleweed, so I only get updates once/day, twice if something explodes. I used to use Arch, so my update cycle has lengthened from 1-2x/day to 1-2x/week, which is so much better.
gets two update notifications
Ah, must be explosion Wednesday
I really like the tumbleweed method, seems like the best compromise between arch and debian style updates.
I think a lot of what (open)SUSE does is pretty solid. For example, microOS is a fantastic compromise between a stable base and a rolling userspace, and I think a lot of people would do well to switch to it from Leap. I currently use Leap for my NAS, but I do plan to switch to microOS.
This is AV, and even possible that it is part of definitions (for example some windows file deleted as false positive). You update those daily.
You posted this 14 hours ago, which would have made it 4:30 am in Austin, Texas where Cloudstrike is based. You may have felt the effect on Friday, but it’s extremely likely that the person who made the change did it late on a Thursday.
Yeah my plans of going to sleep last night were thoroughly dashed as every single windows server across every datacenter I manage between two countries all cried out at the same time lmao
I always wondered who even used windows server given how marginal its marketshare is. Now i know from the news.
Marginal? You must be joking. A vast amount of servers run on Windows Server. Where I work alone we have several hundred and many companies have a similar setup. Statista put the Windows Server OS market share over 70% in 2019. While I find it hard to believe it would be that high, it does clearly indicate it’s most certainly not a marginal percentage.
I’m not getting an account on Statista, and I agree that its marketshare isn’t “marginal” in practice, but something is up with those figures, since overwhelmingly internet hosted services are on top of Linux. Internal servers may be a bit different, but “servers” I’d expect to count internet servers…
Most servers aren’t Internet-facing.
Well, I’ve seen some, but they usually don’t have automatic updates and generally do not have access to the Internet.
This is a crowdstrike issue specifically related to the falcon sensor. Happens to affect only windows hosts.
It’s only marginal for running custom code. Every large organization has at least a few of them running important out-of-the-box services.
Not too long ago, a lot of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software ran on MS SQL Server. Businesses made significant investments in software and training, and some of them don’t have the technical, financial, or logistical resources to adapt - momentum keeps them using Windows Server.
For example, small businesses that are physically located in rural areas can’t use cloud based services because rural internet is too slow and unreliable. Its not quite the case that there’s no amount of money you can pay for a good internet connection in rural America, but last time I looked into it, Verizon wanted to charge me $20,000 per mile to run a fiber optic cable from the nearest town to my client’s farm.
My current company does and I hate it so much. Who even got that idea in the first place? Linux always dominated server-side stuff, no?
You should read the saga of when MS bought Hotmail. The work they had to do to be able to run it on Windows was incredible. It actually helped MS improve their server OS, and it still wasn’t as performance when they switched over.
No, Linux doesn’t now nor has it ever dominated the server space.
Yes, but the developers learned on Windows, so they wrote software for Windows.
In university computer science, in the states, MS server was the main server OS that they taught my class during our education.
Microsoft loses money to let the universities and students use and learn MS server for free, or at least they did at the time. This had the effect of making a lot of fresh grad developers more comfortable with using MS server, and I’m sure it led to MS server being used in cases where there were better options.
Almost everyone, because the Windows server market share isn’t marginal at all.
How many coffee cups have you drank in the last 12 hours?
I work in a data center
I lost count
What was Dracula doing in your data centre?
Because he’s Dracula. He’s twelve million years old.
THE WORMS
Surely Dracula doesn’t use windows.
I work in a datacenter, but no Windows. I slept so well.
Though a couple years back some ransomware that also impacted Linux ran through, but I got to sleep well because it only bit people with easily guessed root passwords. It bit a lot of other departments at the company though.
This time even the Windows folks were spared, because CrowdStrike wasn’t the solution they infested themselves with (they use other providers, who I fully expect to screw up the same way one day).
There was a point where words lost all meaning and I think my heart was one continuous beat for a good hour.
Did you feel a great disturbance in the force?
How’s it going, Obi-Wan?
Here’s the fix: (or rather workaround, released by CrowdStrike) 1)Boot to safe mode/recovery 2)Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike 3)Delete the file matching “C-00000291*.sys” 4)Boot the system normally
It’s disappointing that the fix is so easy to perform and yet it’ll almost certainly keep a lot of infrastructure down for hours because a majority of people seem too scared to try to fix anything on their own machine (or aren’t trusted to so they can’t even if they know how)
They also gotta get the fix through a trusted channel and not randomly on the internet. (No offense to the person that gave the info, it’s maybe correct but you never know)
Yeah, and it’s unknown if CS is active after the workaround or not (source: hackernews commentator)
True, but knowing what the fix might be means you can Google it and see what comes back. It was on StackOverflow for example, but at the time of this comment has been taken offline for moderation - whatever that means.
Meh. Even if it bricked crowdstrike instead of helping, you can just restore the file you deleted. A file in that folder can’t brick a windows system.
Yeah and a lot of corpo VPNs are gonna be down from this too.
This sort of fix might not be accessible to a lot of employees who don’t have admin access on their company laptops, and if the laptop can’t be accessed remotely by IT then the options are very limited. Trying to walk a lot of nontechnical users through this over the phone won’t go very well.
Yup, that’s me. We booted into safe mode, tried navigating into the CrowdStrike folder and boom: permission denied.
Half our shit can’t even boot into safe mode because it’s encrypted and we don’t have the keys rofl
If you don’t have the keys, what the hell are you doing? We have bitlocker enabled and we have a way to get the recovery key so it’s not a problem. Just a huge pain in the ass.
I went home lol. Some other poor schmucks are probably gonna reformat the computers.
Might seem easy to someone with a technical background. But the last thing businesses want to be doing is telling average end users to boot into safe mode and start deleting system files.
If that started happening en masse we would quickly end up with far more problems than we started with. Plenty of users would end up deleting system32 entirely or something else equally damaging.
I do IT for some stores. My team lead briefly suggested having store managers try to do this fix. I HARD vetoed that. That’s only going to do more damage.
It might not even be that. A lot of places have many servers (and even more virtual servers) running crowdstrike. Some places also seem to have it on endpoints too.
That’s a lot of machines to manually fix.
That is unfortunate but also leads me to a different question
Why do people like windows server? I’ve had to use it a couple of times for work and although it’s certainly better than just using the desktop windows it’s so heavy compared to running something like Debian
In our case, the fact we were using windows server actually made it a worse experience for customers aswell because the hardware was not up to it (because budget constraints) so it just chugged and slowed down everything making it a terrible experience for everyone involved (not to mention how often it’d have to be rebooted because a service wouldn’t restart)
And people need to travel to remote machines to do this in person
You can do it over the phone. I just did a few dozen this morning and it was relatively easy.
“yes, now open the file explorer. No, that’s internet explorer… Yes, with the files. Now go to this pc… No, I know you are at this pc, but the entry on the left. No that’s the keyboard. On the screen. Where it says this pc, on the left. The left. The left. … That’s the start menu. Okay, let’s try this a different way. On the keyboard, press the windows key and r. No, simultaneously. The windows key is the one with the flag. Yes. R. As in Romeo. Yes I know a window appeared, very good. Now type c colon backslash windows backslash system 32… Yes like the numbers. No, that’s a semicolon. Yes. Shift. On the keyboard. Simultaneously. And another backslash drivers. Click OK. What error? Why did you type that after the colon? It needs to go at the end. Yes, the end. Yes. Yes. Now click OK. What error? Read the text you typed to me. Why didn’t you delete the semicolon? Yes. Yes. What error?! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”
yeah, sometimes that’s just not an option…
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I wouldn’t fix it if it’s not my responsibly at work. What if I mess up and break things further?
When things go wrong, best to just let people do the emergency process.
I’m on a bridge still while we wait for Bitlocker recovery keys, so we can actually boot into safemode, but the Bitkocker key server is down as well…
Gonna be a nice test of proper backups and disaster recovery protocols for some organisations
Chaos Monkey test
Man, it sure would suck if you could still get to safe mode from pressing f8. Can you imagine how terrible that’d be?
You hold down Shift while restarting or booting and you get a recovery menu. I don’t know why they changed this behaviour.
That was the dumbest thing to learn this morning.
A driver failure, yeesh. It always sucks to deal with it.
Not that easy when it’s a fleet of servers in multiple remote data centers. Lots of IT folks will be spending their weekend sitting in data center cages.
This is going to be a Big Deal for a whole lot of people. I don’t know all the companies and industries that use Crowdstrike but I might guess it will result in airline delays, banking outages, and hospital computer systems failing. Hopefully nobody gets hurt because of it.
Big chunk of New Zealands banks apparently run it, cos 3 of the big ones can’t do credit card transactions right now
It was mayhem at PakNSave a bit ago.
In my experience it’s always mayhem at PakNSave.
If anything, it’s probably calmed P’n’S down a bit…
cos 3 of the big ones can’t do credit card transactions right now
Bitcoin still up and running perhaps people can use that
Bitcoin Cash maybe. Didn’t they bork Bitcoin (Core) so you have to wait for confirmations in the next block?
Several 911 systems were affected or completely down too
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Wow, I didn’t realize CrowdStrike was widespread enough to be a single point of failure for so much infrastructure. Lot of airports and hospitals offline.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed the global ground stop for airlines including United, Delta, American, and Frontier.
Flights grounded in the US.
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The thought of a local computer being unable to boot because some remote server somewhere is unavailable makes me laugh and sad at the same time.
I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. As far as I know it’s an issue with a driver installed on the computers, not with anything trying to reach out to an external server. If that were the case you’d expect it to fail to boot any time you don’t have an Internet connection.
Windows is bad but it’s not that bad yet.
It’s just a fun coincidence that the azure outage was around the same time.
Yep, and it’s harder to fix Windows VMs in Azure that are effected because you can’t boot them into safe mode the same way you can with a physical machine.
Foof. Nightmare fuel.
expect it to fail to boot any time you don’t have an Internet connection.
So, like the UbiSoft umbilical but for OSes.
Edit: name of publisher not developer.
A remote server that you pay some serious money to that pushes a garbage driver that prevents yours from booting
Not only does it (possibly) prevent booting, but it will also bsod it first so you’ll have to see how lucky you get.
Goddamn I hate crowdstrike. Between this and them fucking up and letting malware back into a system, I have nothing nice to say about them.
It’s bsod on boot
And anything encrypted with bitlocker can’t even go into safe mode to fix it
It doesn’t consistently bsod on boot, about half of affected machines did in our environment, but all of them did experience a bsod while running. A good amount of ours just took the bad update, bsod’d and came back up.
yeah so you can’t get Chinese government spyware installed.
Ironic. They did what they are there to protect against. Fucking up everyone’s shit
I’m so exhausted… This is madness. As a Linux user I’ve busy all day telling people with bricked PCs that Linux is better but there are just so many. It never ends. I think this is outage is going to keep me busy all weekend.
An offline server is a secure server!
Honestly my philosophy these days, when it comes to anything proprietary. They just can’t keep their grubby little fingers off of working software.
At least this time it was an accident.
There is nothing unsafer than local networks.
AV/XDR is not optional even in offline networks. If you don’t have visibility on your network, you are totally screwed.
Clownstrike
Crowdshite haha gotem
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