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Notes -
The crowdstrike incident report is up
As far as documents go it shows that Crowdstrikes competence is... horrific.
Finding 1.
What this says is that they did not test supplying IPC template type to the sensor at all or how many parameters the IPC template type produces? what kind of nonsense is thais.
(hey can you prevent autoformatting for quotes it's really annoying that I can't exactly quote the doc)
So they didn't do the 1 liner test of checking array's inputs? I know in C you can't do this because array's do not contain their own length as a variable, but a c++ vector would have found this error (I guess in the kernel it's C or bust?). Congrats on using the root of all evil the regex So the regex created some interesting behavior on the (invalid) 21st input because of an OUT OF BOUNDS ARRAY access, oh boy.
Automated testing somehow doesnt' include having 21 valid inputs in your 21 parameter funciton? Man now that's some brainpower ChatGPT can write tests better than that.
12 test cases which didn't seem to include any invalid inputs? where's your input validation? Where's the array bounds checking?
as expected NO INPUT VALIDATION
CLOWNSTRIKE indeed.
Basically they didn't do integration testing.
Somethign like
IPCtemplatetype a= IPCtemplatetype.new(1,2,3,4,5,6,7) contentInterpreter b = Functionthatbreaks(IPCtemplatetype)
literally would have instant crashed.
They tested by having each thing be intependently tested by making a fake template type for the content interpreter but not using a real generated one.
Ok I know integration testing is hard, and get's exponentially complicated quickly but you can do basic tests by generating a single instance and then checking.
Or here's a billion dollar idea, just turn on a goddamn windows machine locally with your patch before sending it out. This patch broke ~100% of windows machines it came across, so you just needed to have done 1 manual patch of 1 fucking machine locally to have discovered this bug.
Basic procedure for every large org, and it wasn't followed at something this big? CLOWNSTRIKE continues
I understand when you have 100 customers, a delayed rollout literally does nothing, but at around 1000 customers it does and at the scale crowdstrike was operating at delayed rollouts are basically mandatory
ok the rest of the doc is mostly corporate jargon and meaningless, but boy this wasn't your normal fuckup this was a fuckup of epicly stupid programming oversight. Multiple errors that an absolute novice should have figured out which the most basic of tests would have found.
what the fuck is wrong with clownstrike
I want naming and shaming. If you fail this badly, there need to be very serious consequences for you personally. Fines, public humiliation, prison sentence, corporal punishment... Otherwise why would anyone bother doing things correctly in future?
What if a selection of Crowdstrike executives, coders and management had to have 'moron' tattooed on their foreheads?
That would be neither useful, nor justified. First, plenty of those people you named are almost certainly guilty of nothing except choosing to do as they were told instead of losing their livelihood. That doesn't deserve punishment. Second, for those who are truly guilty of negligence, losing their job is enough negative consequence as long as it isn't some bullshit "he got fired but he got paid handsomely for it" as is often the case for executives. We shouldn't reward incompetence (cue @faceh justifiably tapping the sign), but neither do we need to take extreme measures to punish it. Just regular punishment is enough, if we actually do it. Third, your solution would ultimately just cause people to work hard at covering up their sins and make things worse overall. You would have to be pretty stupid to do an honest post mortem if it meant someone was going to get a caning or a "moron" tattoo as a result.
This is how we get hundred billion dollar black holes, massive financial crises, wars that go nowhere based on pure fantasy and defiance of reality, 20 years of barking up the wrong tree on Alzheimers research due to fraud...
I believe in regular punishment for regular incompetence but this was above and beyond anything normal. Just doing as you're told isn't good enough for critical infrastructure like this. Any normal person tests updates before releasing them. And in the case of egregious failures where the whole organization has gone badly off the rails, why should anyone trust that they'd do a proper post-mortem? Any investigation should be run by outsiders, that's the most basic step.
Furthermore, punishment enhances public trust that everyone is in it together. The leadership class enjoys prestige and great wealth, they should also accept great penalties if they make massive negligent errors.
Where did you read that take? It's not clear to me whether you mean Marc Tessier-Lavigne or Sylvain Lesne, but in both cases it's a huge overstatement. Both were peripheral to the main story of beta-amyloid plaques which originated before either author, had strong evidence in favor of it, and (I would argue) have strong evidence in favor of the plaque hypothesis being false at this point. But the enormous research and clinical efforts on beta-amyloid plaques would have happened even in the absence of either fraud.
I'll note that of the people in the field I've spoken with, most still believe in the plaque hypothesis and think we just aren't treating patients early enough or some other excuse.
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