Notices by Kevin Beaumont (gossithedog@cyberplace.social)

Steam founder Gabe Newell has $1bn worth of yachts all around the world.

Steam doesn’t get nearly enough shit from gamers btw. It is DRM lock in, they make $10bn with about 200 employees and shut everyone out of the PC market.

https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php

Compare and contrast how many cookies and trackers you get on Mastodon to any other social media platform, I dare you.

How to out compete any major tech vendor right now: work in the same space as their core products - but just don't put anything AI in the product.

They're all so distracting tickling their own bollocks with AI right now they've completely lost focus on their core products and real customer needs.

Every so often some Linux guy replies to me saying ‘no critical infrastructure runs Windows’, so I just gotta say, today is education for you.

Crowdstrike published a faulty update. Causes Windows to bluescreen. Driver is C-00000291*.sys. Will cause worldwide outages. Thread follows, I suspect. 🧵

I am obtaining a copy of the driver to see if malicious or bad coding, if anybody else checking let me know.

If anybody is wondering the impact of the Crowdstrike thing - it’s really bad. Machines don’t boot.

The recovery is boot in safe mode, log in as local admin and delete things - which isn’t automateable. Basically Crowdstrike will be in very hot water.

You know it was coming...

Crowdstrike's BSOP theme tune

Sky News has gone off air in the UK.

Favour to IT folks fixing - could you please copy the C-00000291*.sys file to somewhere and upload it to Virustotal, and reply with the Virustotal link or file hash? It's still unclear if the update was malicious or just a bug.

I've obtained copies of the .sys driver files Crowdstrike customers have. They're garbage. Each customer appears to have a different one.

They trigger an issue that causes Windows to blue screen.

I am unsure how these got pushed to customers. I think Crowdstrike might have a problem.

For any orgs in recovery mode, I'd suspend auto updates of CS for now.

If anybody is wondering, the update was delivered via channel file updates in Crowdstrike.

BBC tracker (they mix up an earlier Microsoft outage, what they're actually tracking is the Crowdstrike issue) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cnk4jdwp49et

The .sys files causing the issue are channel update files, they cause the top level CS driver to crash as they're invalidly formatted. It's unclear how/why Crowdstrike delivered the files and I'd pause all Crowdstrikes updates temporarily until they can explain.

This is going to turn out to be the biggest 'cyber' incident ever in terms of impact, just a spoiler, as recovery is so difficult.

CrowdStrike's shares are down 20% in pre-market.

I'm seeing people posting scripts for automated recovery.. Scripts don't work if the machine won't boot (it causes instant BSOD) -- you still need to manually boot the system in safe mode, get through BitLocker recovery (needs per system key), then execute anything.

Crowdstrike are huge, at a global scale that's going to take.. some time.

Crowdstrike statement: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cnk4jdwp49et?post=asset%3A0c379e1f-48df-493c-a11a-f6b1e3d1eb63#post

Basically 'it's not a security incident... we just bricked a million systems'

For anybody wondering why Microsoft keep ending up in the frame, they had an Azure outage and- this may be news to some people- a lot of Microsoft support staff are actually external vendors, eg TCS, Mindtree, Accenture etc.

Some of those vendors use Crowdstrike, and so those support staff have no systems.

But MS isn’t the outage cause today.

Crowdstrike publishes updated CIA triad

By far my fave thing with the Crowdstrike thing is Microsoft saying to try turning impacted PCs off and on again in a loop until you get the magic reboot where CrowdStrike updates before it blue screens.