This is going to turn out it was a hack in several months right?
Never attribute to maliciousness that which can be explained by incompetence.
That said, I’m sure the Crowdstrike CEO is currently on a phone call with three of their pet Congresscritters asking if they can get a $100M grant to harden their systems against Russia/China/NKorea/Antifa interference right now.
I’ll just quietly leave this here: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/crowdstrike-google-cloud-expand-strategic-partnership/
Won’t take that long, security researchers are already decompiling the update to see if it was malicious or incompetence.
You won’t find the incompetence in the software no matter what.
If you fail to assume that the software contains issues – if you fail to understand that your software is made by humans and humans make mistakes, not because they’re bad but because they’re human – and if you fail to implement mechanisms to feel gracefully with inevitable failures, THAT is the incompetence.
Failures are systemic.
Hacks of this grade tend to be targeted, this is most likely incompetence.
Think big. This may have had a target. But hitting the target only wasn’t possible so everyone got hit.
It’s possible those responsible only had this weapon that was capable of hitting the target, maybe the plan was to disrupt world flights to make someone late tomorrow, who knows. Maybe poo-tin or Xi-the-Pooh wanted to hit America and its allies?
A state actor will use more precise techniques to attack specific targets. Think SolarWinds and Stuxnet.
Ransomware doesn’t apply here and tends to depend on phishing first anyway.
Even terrorists have specific targets in mind.
So it’s either Bond villains or incompetence.
Edit: The only way i can fit your comment would be an incompetent script kiddy. Even then, doesn’t make sense as all systems were not directly attacked, as would be the case, but rather through what would have to be a side-channel attack, so no.
A lot of companies will get calls from the “provider” offering help with mitigation so that additional features can also be installed. This is a time to be extra wary.
Edited: spelling
Company spyware. We have that on our devices. They used to have an “about” stored locally on the app, but removed it and a web connection is required to view the docs. Basically says it downloads/sees everything on your device and checks for threats. Thing is a few people have been fired for having things in their devices they shouldn’t. I didn’t ask what it was, nor did I hear how these things were “threats”, but nonetheless they were fired. Too many people treat company hardware like “free device, bro!” and put all sorts of personal stuff on the device. Most industries it’s probably not too big of a deal, but for mine if there’s an incident that happens when you were busy watching Netflix or something instead of doing your job you’re fucked. First thing they’ll do is check your device and crowdstrike to see what you were doing, and even if you weren’t watching Netflix all your personal data will be exposed.
They definitely could, but most cybersecurity departments are paid too much to worry about minor items like that. If HR tells us to look into a specific user and gets the proper approvals so that everything is in compliance, we’ll definitely get someone on the team to do it, but otherwise if we happen to see evidence of unapproved usage, we’re mostly going to overlook it unless it could lead to something dangerous to your machine or the company as a whole.
EDRs like Crowdstrike can see very very nearly everything you do though, definitely everything you would care about.
Crowstrike Onstrike
What a striking name… CrowdStrike heh. They definitely live up to it!
This is why you do staged rollouts of updates… not the entire planet at once.
I don’t know exactly how crowd strike works, but this sounded like a “virus signatures” update (IE not a software update per se). And thats what caused the issue.
I think “real time virus protection” is why people use it so they expect the signatures to get updated asap/with little to no human intervention.
This is a crowd strike epic fail…for how they let their software blue screen systems with a virus signature update.
So true, this really highlights the risk of updates impacting critical systems vs critical systems being exposed to critical vulnerabilities. Its a real balancing act.
