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Ok this might just be funny to me, but the
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike worldwide outage is the funniest thing to happen in computer security this decade.If you haven't caught up,
100+ million(billion?) computers around the world were simulatenously broken in an instant. It's black comedy for sure. Hospital & emergency systems around the world have crawled to a halt, and there will be a few hundred deaths that will be traced back to this event. Millions of $$ will be lost. But, the humor comes from the cause of it.Here is how things panned out:
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike is a 100 billion valuation tech company that provides security services to a bulk of the world business.CloudStrikeCrowdstrike deployed a software update that began this outageCloudStrikeCrowdstrike is a 'trusted' secuirty tool, it sits under the OS layer, bricking the whole device.This is the Y2k that was promised.
The world spends billions in computer security every year, and no virus has managed the kind of world-wide disruption caused by one simple bug by the premier security company in the world.
No direct culture war implications, but goes to show just how much of a house-of-cards the tech ecosystem is. 1 little, simple, stupid bug can bring the whole world to a halt. Yet, the industry continues quarterly-earnings chasing.
Jobs keep getting cut, senior members get aged out, timelines get thinner and 'how many features did you deploy' remains the only metric for evaluation.
In tech, staying at a job for more than 3 years is seen as coasting. Devs are increasingly expected to do everything, because 'everyone should be full stack' and everything that isn't feature development (testing, staging, canaries) get deprioritized. Overworked novices means carelessness, carelessness creates mistakes.
At the same time, devs get zero agency. Random HR types make list of regulations mandating certain checkboxes for compliance, while having near-zero knowledge of the risks-and-benefits of these technical decisions. Therefore, the implications of a mistake are opaque to decisions makers. So by being compliant, you've suddenly given
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike a button to shut your entire business down.This kind of error should literally be impossible in a company of the size of
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike . If such an error happens, it should be impossible for giant corporations to crumble zero backup. Incompetence on display, on all sides. Having worked in 'prestigious tech companies', especially in 2024, it isn't surprising. At times, the internal dysfunction is seriously alarming, other times it's a tuesday.I'm not going to hope for much out of this. Just like Spectre & Solar , people will cry about it for weeks, demand change and everyone will get collective amnesia about it as the next quarter rolls around.
End of the day, tech workers are treated as disposable labor. Executive bean counters are divorced from the product. And the stock price is the only incentive that matters.
As long as tech is run by MBAs and smooth talkers, this will go on.
Some choice photos:
If what is being is reported is true and they released some unrunnable or improperly formatted file, I can’t even comprehend that level of incompetence. There is a lot of bullshit at my company which is also dealing with many of the issues you’ve addressed in your post, and of course we have incidents, but something so basic being released with such insane permissions would not be possible at my workplace. Of course that’s discounting any malicious actor, but the number of QA cycles and slow rollout that we go through would have caught something like this 5 weeks before it sniffed release.
Something or someone is deeply rotten at crowdstrike. They need to make a big-time firing or I predict that people will start fleeing in droves.
This seems to me like a fairly usual level of competence from a bolt-on-security-as-a-product or compliance-as-a-service company. Examples:
It's not that it's amateur hour specifically at CrowdStrike. It's the whole industry.
I incidentally just learned about the Okta breach yesterday simply by getting frustrated with it and searching on Twitter evidence on whether everyone else hates using it continuously as much as I do.
I have the opinion that the more data you give out, the more likely it will just get breached. Especially personal data meant to authenticate your identity. The best thing to do would be to not give data out at all - data that doesn't exist, can't be stolen - but most of the rest of the world doesn't think the same way, and are extremely unlikely to question why we have normalized people giving away their data without a second thought.
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