a bug in CrowdStrike’s cloud-based testing system
Always blame the tests. There are so many dark patterns in this industry including blaming qa for being the last group to touch a release, that I never believe “it’s the tests”.
There’s usually something more systemic going on where something like this is missed by project management and developers, or maybe they have a blind spot that it will never happen, or maybe there’s a lack of communication or planning, or maybe they outsourced testing to the cheapest offshore providers, or maybe everyone has huge time pressure, but “it’s the tests”
whatwhatwhatwhat@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The fact that they weren’t already doing staggered releases is mind-boggling. I work for a company with a minuscule fraction of CrowdStrike’s user base / value, and even we do staggered releases.
foggenbooty@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They do have staggered releases, but it’s a bit more complicated. The client that you run does have versioning and you can choose to lag behind the current build, but this was a bad definition update. Most people want the latest definition to protect themselves from zero days. The whole thing is complicated and a but wonky, but the real issue here is cloudflare’s kernel driver not validating the content of the definition before loading it.
whatwhatwhatwhat@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Makes sense that it was a definitions update that caused this, and I get why that’s not something you’d want to lag behind on like you could with the agent. (Putting aside that one of the selling points of next-gen AV/EDR tools is that they’re less reliant on definitions updates compared to traditional AV.) It’s just a bit wild that there isn’t more testing in place.
It’s like we’re always walking this fine line between “security at all costs” vs “stability, convenience, etc”. By pushing definitions as quickly as possible, you improve security, but you’re taking some level of risk too. In some alternate universe, CS didn’t push definitions quickly enough, and a bunch of companies got hit with a zero-day. I’d say it’s an impossible situation sometimes, but if I had to choose between outage or data breach, I’m choosing outage every time.