Another CrowdStrike-like outage could collapse cashless societies

[Squid Surprise]

Rubbish. Crowdstrike doesn't administer IT systems for anyone. They make a product.

lol - the PRODUCT is automated security patches… it’s what large companies pay for instead of paying for in house IT who will be inferior.

That's a good reason to not let any external company automate it. But mainly it's because only you have full knowledge of your own systems.

You really think your local IT company - with far less experience - will do a better job? Being familiar with a windows system is what CrowdStrike is paid to be - and usually, they are.

It's not a hard concept - Always do such updates as a test first. Or at the very least, on one live system before a full deployment.

Pretty sure they do - this was an anomaly… again, I suspect the byproduct of hacking.

 

[user556]

The security patches are for Windoze in general, not for your machines specifically. That's a big difference.
It's a department in these big outfits. They look after their own facilities.
It most certainly should be an anomaly since so many large scale systems should never have been autonomously untested like that. Whether M$ learns that or not is still to be seen.

 

[Squid Surprise]

The security patches are for Windoze in general, not for your machines specifically. That's a big difference.
It's a department in these big outfits. They look after their own facilities.
It most certainly should be an anomaly since so many large scale systems should never have been autonomously untested like that. Whether M$ learns that or not is still to be seen.

They are for Windows - but depending on the package you purchase from CrowdStrike, you can customize… and again, they ARE tested - which is why I said this incident is highly suspicious.

 

[user556]

They are for Windows - but depending on the package you purchase from CrowdStrike, you can customize… and again, they ARE tested - which is why I said this incident is highly suspicious.

And what is this test environment? One of their customer's own machines at least I hope?
Even then, unmonitored automated testing is a total recipe for disaster eventually. And here we are.
And it'll keep repeating if what you are saying is the norm now.

 

[Squid Surprise]

And what is this test environment? One of their customer's own machines at least I hope?
Even then, unmonitored automated testing is a total recipe for disaster eventually. And here we are.
And it'll keep repeating if what you are saying is the norm now.

I don’t think you understand the meaning of “customize”… but then, you’ve failed to grasp any of my points up til now so I guess that’s par for the course.

CrowdStrike has been one of the leaders in what they do for years… until last week, the fact that you’d never heard of them was a good thing - it meant they were doing their job really well…

Again, last week’s incident COULD have resulted from one act of extreme stupidity… but I find it highly unlikely. We may never find out exactly what happened - but there is more going on than what we’re being told.

 

[user556]

It really makes no difference whether there was malicious action or just a mistake. The mechanism of allowing one system to update all other systems without separate testing of each of those others will then eventually lead to massive failures.

 

[user556]

I guess we can expect many more repeats of this type of incident going forward then.

 

[Squid Surprise]

It really makes no difference whether there was malicious action or just a mistake. The mechanism of allowing one system to update all other systems without separate testing of each of those others will then eventually lead to massive failures.

The system is the same whether you deploy before or after testing… my guess is that CrowdStrike tested a routine patch, and then “someone” modified the patch before it was globally deployed.

While you might reply “better to depend on your own company’s security” a company like CrowdStrike is usually far more secure than your average large corporation… but alas, no one is unhackable…

 

[Squid Surprise]

I guess we can expect many more repeats of this type of incident going forward then.

Yep - THAT we can agree on… and there’s not much anyone can do other than really stress security - but nothing’s perfectly secure.

 

[user556]

It's not about security at all. It's what I just said: "The mechanism of allowing one system to update all other systems without separate testing of each of those others will then eventually lead to massive failures."
That's about reliability rather than security.

 

[Squid Surprise]

It's not about security at all. It's what I just said: "The mechanism of allowing one system to update all other systems without separate testing of each of those others will then eventually lead to massive failures."
That's about reliability rather than security.

The mechanism exists to deploy patches to multiple machines… the patches are SUPPOSED to be tested first… if they aren’t tested, it’s either because of extreme stupidity… or it’s because of a lapse of security and a malicious actor exploiting the lapse…

The answer is more security - if you lose the ability to deploy patches to multiple machines, the entire technological world would be paralyzed.

 

[user556]

That's the problem then. That's plain bad practise.