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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   39207 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Ok this might just be funny to me, but the CloudStrike Crowdstrike 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:

  • CloudStrike Crowdstrike is a 100 billion valuation tech company that provides security services to a bulk of the world business.
  • Most sensitive organizations (govt, military, healthcare) will refuse to work with you unless you are compliant & all your machines have this installed.
  • It is effectively an anti-virus that sits 1 level below your operating system, 'protecting' your organization from 'bad outcomes'.
  • On Friday afternoon (which we all know is the best time), CloudStrike Crowdstrike deployed a software update that began this outage
  • For any other software this would be a simple restart or uninstall away, but since CloudStrike Crowdstrike is a 'trusted' secuirty tool, it sits under the OS layer, bricking the whole device.
  • Alright, so how do they fix it ?...... THEY CANT !
  • The beauty of bricked device, is you can't send any more software updates to it. You must do it manually. Raw dog it like the 90s.....all 100 million of these computers.
  • That's bad, but surely they can give those instructions to people and each person can fix their laptops themselves. Divide the labor.....
  • NOPE !
  • This software is used in vending machines, kiosks, tablet displays....and all sorts of devices that sometimes don't have keyboards and other times haven't been looked at for years. But at least there is a fix right ?
  • Yes....... but it needs you to start the computer in safe mode....which you can't because 'Bitlocker'.
  • Ah yes, Bitlocker. Turns out, another security measure, makes it so that 99% of a company's employees can't open safe mode.
  • So yes, a few hundred IT people will be responsible for fixing hundreds upon hundreds of laptops, daily, for weeks !

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 CloudStrike Crowdstrike a button to shut your entire business down.

This kind of error should literally be impossible in a company of the size of CloudStrike Crowdstrike . 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:

  • CVE-2016-2208: buffer overflow in Symantec Antivirus "This is a remote code execution vulnerability. Because Symantec use a filter driver to intercept all system I/O, just emailing a file to a victim or sending them a link is enough to exploit it. [...] On Windows, this results in kernel memory corruption, as the scan engine is loaded into the kernel (wtf!!!), making this a remote ring0 memory corruption vulnerability - this is about as bad as it can possibly get". Basically "send an email with an attachment to pwn someone's computer. They don’t have to open the attachment, as long as they have Norton Antivirus (or anything that uses the Symantec Antivirus Engine) installed".
  • CVE-2020-12271: "A SQL injection issue was found in SFOS 17.0, 17.1, 17.5, and 18.0 before 2020-04-25 on Sophos XG Firewall devices, as exploited in the wild in April 2020. [...] A successful attack may have caused remote code execution that exfiltrated usernames and hashed passwords for the local device admin(s), portal admins, and user accounts used for remote access"
  • Okta data breach a couple months back: "For several weeks beginning in late September 2023, intruders had access to [Okta's] customer support case management system. That access allowed the hackers to steal authentication tokens from some Okta customers, which the attackers could then use to make changes to customer accounts, such as adding or modifying authorized users."

It's not that it's amateur hour specifically at CrowdStrike. It's the whole industry.

A general rule: the further a software product is away from "engineering candy", the worse it is.

Software engineers are some of the most entitled, overpaid people on the planet. (I should know!) They have lots of career options.

To get good engineers you need to either pay an outrageous salary or have an interesting product like a video game. Want to find engineers to work on your compliance software? Good luck. Hell, even Google engineers making 400k/year can't be bothered to work on essential but boring products, preferring instead to chase shiny baubles.

No one wants to do the dirty work where good job means not messing up.

I think the problem is that "good job" doesn't mean "not messing up" in the context of these compliance-as-a-service or security-blanket-as-a-service companies. Instead, "good job" is "implement as many features as possible to a level where it's not literally fraud to claim your product has thay feature, and then have a longer checklist of supported features in your product than the competition has so the MBA types choose your product".

CrowdStrike's stock price is only down by about 10% today on one of the highest-impact and highest-profile incidents of this type I've seen. I'm pretty sure their culture of "ship it even if it's janky and broken" has netted them more than a 10% increase in net revenue, so it's probably net positive to have that kind of culture.

Their net revenue is under a billion a year. The total economic damage caused by this single bug is almost certainly larger than the total net income of the entire history of the company. In fact, it is almost certainly larger than the total gross income of the entire history of the company. I do not know where the valuation is coming from, but it certainly isn't from their revenue figures.

Lol P/E of 644.

But it's a hyper-growth company bro, surely they'll be able to pivot to making money once they've captured the full market bro.

Yeah but if they're not liable what relevance does that have to their share price?

I don't know if they're liable or not. I doubt Crowdstrike knows if they're liable or not.

the further a software product is away from "engineering candy", the worse it is.

To get good engineers you need to either pay an outrageous salary or have an interesting product like a video game.

I mean, you could get good engineers with a video game project, but for that you have to be willing to also pay them the outrageous salary. Video game projects are more art than engineering, requiring more designers than engineers. And the brilliant engineers won't work for that much below market rate; if that were their goal they'd go into research or try to get into an early-stage startup, not join a project that's just the application of an existing engine to a new gameplay design. The game projects that appeal to engineers don't sell enough for AAA development, they're nerd games like Factorio or RimWorld (sorry friends).

Not that game companies don't capitalize on the appeal of their projects to talent. They just capitalize by taking lower-tier but motivated engineers/artists/designers and running them into the ground.

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