It's not really criticism, it's competitors claiming they will never fuck up.
Like, if you found mouse in your hamburger at McDonald's, that's a massive fuckup. If Burger King then started saying "you'll never find anything gross in Burger King food!" that would be both crass opportunism and patently false.
It's reasonable to criticize CrowdStrike. They fucked up huge. The incident was a fuckup, and creating an environment where one incident could cause total widespread failure was a systemic fuckup. And it's not even their first fuckup, just the most impactful and public.
But also Microsoft fucked up. And the clients, those who put all of their trust into Microsoft and CrowdStrike without regard to testing, backups, or redundancy, they fucked up, too. Delta shut down, cancelling 4,600 flights. American Airlines cancelled 43 flights, 10 of which would have been cancelled even without the outage.
Like, imagine if some diners at McDonald's connected their mouths to a chute that delivers pre-chewed food sight-unseen into their gullets, and then got mad when they fell ill from eating a mouse. Don't do that, not at any restaurant.
All that said, if you fuck up, you don't get to complain about your competitors being crass opportunists.
Even if that's the case, how is it Crowdstrike's place to call these other companies out for claiming something similar will never happen to them? Thus far, it had only ever happened to CS.
Resiliency and security have a lot of layers. The crowd strike bungle was very bad but more than anything it shined a bright spot light on the fact that certain organizations IT orgs are just a house of cards waiting to get blown away.
I'm looking at Delta in particular. Airlines are a critical transportation service and to have issues with one software vendor bring your entire company screeching to a halt is nothing short of embarrassing.
If I were on the board, my first question would be, "where's our DRP and why was this situation not accounted for?"
In what way did Microsoft fuck up? They don't control Crowdstrike updates. Short of the OS files being immutable it seems unlikely they can stop things like this.
It's not really criticism, it's competitors claiming they will never fuck up.
Not in all cases [podcast warning], sometimes it's just them pointing out they're doing silly things like how they test every update and don't let it out the door with <98% positive returns or having actual deployment rings instead of of yeeting an update to millions systems in less than an hour.
It's reasonable to criticize CrowdStrike. They fucked up huge. The incident was a fuckup, and creating an environment where one incident could cause total widespread failure was a systemic fuckup. And it's not even their first fuckup, just the most impactful and public.
Clownstrike deserves every bit of shit they're getting, and it amazes me that people are buying the bullshit they're selling. They had no real testing or quality control in place, because if that update had touched test windows boxes it would have tipped them over and they'd have actually known about it ahead of time. Fucking up is fine, we all do it. But when your core practices are that slap dash, bitching about criticism just brings more attention to how badly your processes are designed.
But also Microsoft fucked up.
How did Microsoft fuck up? Giving a security vender kernel access? Like they're obligated to from previous lawsuits?
And the clients, those who put all of their trust into Microsoft and CrowdStrike without regard to testing, backups, or redundancy, they fucked up, too
Customers can't test clownstrike updates ahead of time or in a nonprod environment, because clownstrike knows best lol.
Redundancy is not relevant here because what company is going to use different IDR products for primary and secondary tech stacks?
Backups are also not relevant (mostly) because it's quicker to remediate the problem than restore from backup (unless you had super regular DR snaps and enough resolution to roll back from before the problem.
IMO, clownstrike is the issue, and customers have only the slightest blame for using clownstrike and for not spending extra money on a second IDR on redundant stacks.
That one for sure...or: Here's a shiny new thing, customers. You didn't ask for it, and it actually makes our product a little bit worse...but it's new. You don't want to miss out on the new thing, do you?
And instead of following that statement with an apology to all the companies and people they royally fucked in the ass with their shitty business practices, they instead whined about other people pointing out what a massive, colossal, and completely preventable fuckup this was.
Good going sealing my resolve to never use crowdstrike.
When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”
Crowdstrike didn't just fuck up, they killed people. I personally had to postpone a blood test, but mine wasn't critical and I'm alive to complain. Not everyone is.
Hey, they're trying their hardest. It's hard because they had the joke build stored right next to the actual build so when they went to push it they clicked the wrong one.
That one recently with the 2.3 billion record data breach is pretty bad, and we collectively had no way to prevent it since it was through a private company.
In similar news, Enron says that people should stop being ambulance chasers by calling them out for corruption, fraud, and illegal activities.
ClownStrike had a massive, glaring issue with their main functionality that is THEIR COMPANY’S ONLY REASON FOR EXISTING that has been correctly attributed to criminally inept architecture decisions, no redundancy, no checks, no safety measures, and no accountability.
If I made the executive decision to design a system without any safety measures that could potentially push unchecked, malicious code to 90% of the computers that the business world runs on, I would be sued into dust. Honestly, if there were any justice in the world, the people at CrowdStrike that designed such a shite system should do actual prison time for their ineptitude.
If I made the executive decision to design a system without any safety measures that could potentially push unchecked, malicious code to 90% of the computers that the business world runs on, I would be sued into dust.
Nah, this one has a margin of error. It's just that "take down a large percentage of all computers in the world simultaneously" is quite a bit outside of that margin for a security software.
They deserve to go bankrupt after that level of damage. I won't be surprised if a class action comes against them for gross negligence within the next few years. They're cooked and they know it.
Nothing shady about that commentary after seeing how they screwed up. I couldn't believe how amateur hour the cause of the crash was (the program not validating definition file contents, which spectacularly failed when fed a file consisting only of zeroes). They should rename themselves to ClownTrike.
That wasn't what was in the file, it was actual stuff. I saved a copy of it.
What happened was the file directed their craptastic snake oil software, which did absolutely no sanity checking first, to access memory it wasn't actually given which predictably resulted in it crashing, and since its dick was way up the kernels butt at the time they both went down together.
I've been calling them ClownStrike because they're clowns and their incompetence struck everyone else hard.
I am not in the knows about IT security at all, but isn't fucking up part of any security company? You can make shitty comments all you want but who says your company isn't the next one to fuck up?
Not wrong, but they fucked up due to incompetence, not just some random preventable accident.
From the technical details I've seen, just having a basic testing process/environment should have easily prevented this. That should be the bare minimum.