Survival of the Fittest: There is late baseball

Friday, July 19, 2024

There is late baseball

Too late for me...

Guess I'll figure out what happened tomorrow morning.

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I hear you say, "Hey Steve! What is CrowdStrike?"

Well my friends, CrowdStrike is a information security firm that provides protection against cyber attacks. It is used by a large number of companies and government entitites.

Basically, CrowdStrike programs are used to protect digital assets and to provide analysis of ongoing internet threats. They protect companies and governments from attack.

"That's nice but what did they do to cause a lot of companies and government entities to come to a screeching halt today?"

In the old days, when computers were young and frivolous, us programmer types used to write programs that worked all by themselves. Every once in a while, some bright person would write a program that did something that the rest of the programs really liked to do and that program would get turned into a system program that could be called by other programs. But in general, we wrote what amounted to fall-through code. The program started at the top and ended at the bottom.

Now-a-days, everything is called by everything else. Programmers write a small piece of code that basically calls a bunch of other snippets of code to do what the programmers want done. This modular approach to programming is called Object Oriented Programing and it is all the rage because if I'm the programmer of a snippet of code that reads a database and I figure out a better way to read that database, all I have to do is update my snippet and every other program automatically benefits from the upgrade.

The problems happen when some arrogant programer says to himself, "This code is perfect and I tested it on my computer. That means it's okay" and they push their new code out to the world.

In the case of CrowdStrike, my best guess is that the testing done on the snippet of code named CSagent.sys was only done on one, maybe two computers. When the snippet was rolled out, it ended up on all kinds of computers running different versions of the Windows operating systems and different applications. Turns out that CAagent.sys did not work and play well with others and all those computers suddenly refused to work anymore.

And they refused to work in the most spectacular fashion - they BSOD on boot. This what is known as the "Blue Screen Of Death" and since it happened at bootup, there was no way to easily fix the problem.

The bottom line in all of this is if you wanted to do some banking this morning, or you were at an airport to catch plane, or maybe you just wanted to check the weather, you probably couldn't because all of the computers that make those things work suddenly stopped working.

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Here are some links: