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Notes -
This is not confirmed information, but I am hearing it on various technical grapevines and it seems plausible:
The primary bug is not new - the kernel-level driver that Crowdstrike runs (and has been running) has a dormant bug in the portion of it that parses config/data files. This update was "just" a config/data file, so deemed low-risk and put through fewer/simpler rounds of testing than a "real" update to their actual software. Whether it was a weird corner case or a malformed file, the kernel driver tripped over it and triggered the dormant bug. Since it's a kernel-level driver, crashing can affect the OS - and it did, generating an exception on a bad memory access (perfectly routine type of bug, but with privileges!) so the OS crashed.
Im not in a position to confirm but that seem quite plausible and dove-tails with some of what I've heard.
For some reason i find myself thinking of this old XKCD 😉
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Lol that is amazing. Sounds like the most plausible explanation, but maybe even worse because it seems like that should have been caught in a dev or staging environment
Forget about dev or staging, there's no excuse for not fuzz testing your config parser in current year plus nine.
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