When you have the trifecta of regex, *argv packing and uninitialized memory you're reaching levels of incompetence which require being actively malicious and not just stupid.
It cannot have been a surprise to Crowdstrike that pushing bad data had the potential to bork the target computer. So if they had such an attitude that would indicate striking incompetence. So perhaps you are right.
Obviously the system wasn't very robust, as a simple, within specs change could break it. A company like CrowdStrike, which routinely deals with memory exploits and claims to do "zero trust" should know better.
As often, there is a good chance it is an organization problem. The team in charge of the parsing expected that the team in charge of the data did their tests and made sure the files weren't broken, while on the other side, they expected the parser to be robust and at worst, a quick rollback could fix the problem. This may indeed be the sign of a broken company culture, which would give some credit to the ex-employees.
From my limited understanding, the file was corrupted in some way. Lots of NULL bytes, something like that.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Chann...
> Hindsight is always 20/20, but I think the most important lesson is that this code vs data dichotomy can be dangerous if the implications are not fully understood.
But it's not some new condition that the industry hasn't already been dealing with for many many decades (i.e. code vs config vs data vs any other type of change to system, etc.).
There are known strategies to reduce the risk.
It's clear to me that CrowdStrike saw this as a data update vs. a code update, and that they had much more stringent QA procedures for code updates that they did data updates. It's very easy for organizations to lull themselves into this false sense of security when they make these kinds of delineations (sometimes even subconsciously at first), and then over time they lose site of the fact that a bad data update can be just as catastrophic as a bad code update. I've seen shades of this issue elsewhere many times.
So all that said, I think your point is valid. I know Crowdstrike had the posture that they wanted to get vulnerability files deployed globally as fast as possible upon a new threat detection in order to protect their clients, but it wouldn't have been that hard to build in some simple checks in their build process (first deploy to a test bed, then deploy globally) even if they felt a slower staged rollout would have left too many of their clients unprotected for too long.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but I think the most important lesson is that this code vs data dichotomy can be dangerous if the implications are not fully understood.