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Hackers reboot announced for 2025, trailer dropped

The Verge has a quick look at the orgs trying to recover from the Crowdstrike incident.

If you’re wondering why it’s dropped off the radar of most press, they think it’s over as Down Detector looks okay (which, to be clear, is not good logic).

theverge.com/2024/7/21/2420296

The Verge · CrowdStrike outage: Photos, videos, and tales of IT workers fixing BSODsBy Wes Davis

Interesting - did anybody keep a list of tweets by CrowdStrike staff during the start of the incident? This one has been deleted. x.com/brody_n77/status/1814186

Crowdstrike are touting auto remediation of blue screen as an opt in feature.

However, I just tried it - it’s not very successful, most boots still blue screen of death. I think CS need to be careful on messaging about this as it sounds like they’re offering it as a silver bullet. It only works if networking kicks in and the agent updates before Windows finishes booting.

reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments

Delta cancelled another 20% of US flights yesterday as they struggle to recover from CrowdStrike incident bankinfosecurity.com/blogs/cro

Delta are still struggling, suspending additional services.

Upguard have published a list of companies they say are impacted by the CrowdStrike 'Global IT Outage', based on public reporting.

upguard.com/crowdstrike-outage

Edit: obviously it’s missing most companies as most companies aren’t disclosing publicly.

www.upguard.comCompanies impacted by CrowdStrike outageTo help organizations navigate the CrowdStrike Falcon incident we’ve compiled this list of companies reported to have been impacted by the outage.

If anybody wonders what the file that took down 8.5 million Windows systems looks like.. it was 41kb in size. The only validity checking I can see CrowdStrike driver does is to check the first few bytes match the pattern seen in the screenshot before loading and executing.

The US Department of Transport has opened an investigation into Delta over the disruption related to CrowdStrike incident.

Good luck to the CrowdStrike account manager for Delta.

The initial Post Incident Review is out from CrowdStrike. It’s good and really honest.

There’s some wordsmithing (eg channel updates aren’t code - their parameters control code).

The key take away - channel updates are currently deployed globally, instantly. They plan to change this at a later date to operate in waves. This is smart (and what Microsoft do for similar EPP updates).

crowdstrike.com/falcon-content

By ‘this is smart’ I mean ‘this is smart… now’. Obviously they shouldn’t have been globally, simultaneously deploying kernel driver parameter changes across all customers: it was waiting to go wrong.

They still are btw, as it will take a while to engineer the correct way of doing it.

CrowdStrike have won this year's Pwnie Award for Epic Fail, which will please @qwertyoruiop.

If you want to know something crazy:

- This year TCS migrated their EDR to CrowdStrike
- Then they announced a strategic partnership with CrowdStrike
- Then they lost all their systems
- They’re just finishing recovery today, 6 days in
- Then they got a $10 Uber Eats voucher
- …which got cancelled due to Uber flagging CrowdStrike’s account as fraudulent

Questions for your EDR providers (do not assume they are experts in availability):

- What are your different update processes?
- How do you test them?
- Do you dogfood test them?
- Do you roll them out in waves? What are the details, eg what percentages and when?
- Do you monitor failures and roll back?

CrowdStrike staff members are selling CrowdStrike monopoly sets they were given on eBay.

There’s a really good discussion on @riskybusiness’s YouTube show about the CrowdStrike incident.

About the 3 minute mark @alex made me realise I was far too kind to CrowdStrike. He rightly rips them apart.

youtu.be/EGRqtscp4eE

Re the Delta case - the lawyer they’ve hired successfully sued Microsoft previously on behalf of the US government, and the decision was upheld on appeal too. The ruling almost lead to the breaking up of Microsoft.

The following US government backed out of the case.

Bill Gates said at the time the lawyer was “out to destroy Microsoft”.

So there’s a chance here the CrowdStrike incident may end up having implications across vendor industry around warranties etc, we’ll see.

Replacing an XDR platform at scale takes some time, so if you’re wondering what the translation of Elon’s tweet about Crowdstrike is:

Elon: can we replace Crowdstrike?
Somebody: yes, we’ll begin looking into it but..
Elon: job done

Of course.. given how the Twitter takeover happened maybe he just got them to uninstall it and #yolosec

Delta’s CEO has confirmed they plan to take legal action against CrowdStrike after incurring a $500m loss

6 minute video interview: cnbc.com/2024/07/31/delta-ceo-

CrowdStrike made a net loss of $845m between 2018 until this year, and has taken on $743m of debt during this period.

Spirit Airlines in the US anticipates a $7.2 million hit to its third-quarter operating income due to operational disruptions caused by the CrowdStrike incident, which forced the carrier to cancel 470 flights.

Here's the Delta boss on his thoughts about the CrowdStrike incident.

They had 40k Windows Server boxes alone, all with BitLocker full disk encryption enabled, all of which wouldn't boot and weren't fixable without manually unlocking BitLocker. That had gone all in with CrowdStrike + Microsoft's most premium offerings.

He has a really good point about how tech companies have become obsessed with growth as their only metric of success, and customer satisfaction is not on the radar.

There's a really mad moment in that interview where they ask them what assistance CrowdStrike have offered, and he essentially says nothing, not even a lunch voucher.

What a time to be alive.

CrowdStrike’s website then vs now

CrowdStrike complained to Cloudflare about a CrowdStrike parody site… and Cloudflare took it down. Without a court order. clownstrike.lol/crowdmad/

Cloudflare recently announced they have become a strategic partner with CrowdStrike: cloudflare.com/en-gb/press-rel

Additionally to loop this in, CrowdStrike submitted a takedown for a parody label (they’ve since rescinded it after being called out).

360 takes a look at the Crowdstrike kernel drivers - finds they implement an eBPF like system, contain a wide attack surface, don’t check validity of update files (eg no signing of updates) and claim they contain conditions for LPE and RCE vulnerabilities. mp.weixin.qq.com/s/uD7mhzyRSX1

Before people write this off as ‘the Chinese’, I’ll give you a hint: there really, really should be security research about the security of security products across all vendors. I’ve seen things.

AngharadHafod

@GossiTheDog if Kapersky didn't cause us to consider that, I don't know what will.