If you consider kernel programming to be inherently unsafe, then you would consider this to be inevitable, meaning it's not really the specific company's fault. They were just the unlucky ones.
Right, and we wanted to talk about all security solutions and not make this about one company. We also wanted to avoid shaming since they have been seriously working on eBPF adoption, so in that regard they are at the forefront of doing the right thing.
They could have helped their luck by doing some of the common sense things suggested in the article.
For instance, why not find a subset of your customers that are low risk, push it out to them, and see what happens? Or perhaps have your own fleet of example installations to run things on first. None of which depends on any specific technology.
> If I were the customers and I found out that I was used as test subject, how would I feel?
In reality, every business has relationships that it values more than others. If I wasn't paying a lot for it, and if I was running something that wasn't critical (like my side project) then why not? You can price according to what level of service you want to provide.
Canary deployment for subset of Salesforce customers won't see much of revolt from customers compare to AV definition rollout (not software, but AV definition) in Cybersecurity where gaps between 0day and rollout means you're exposed.
If customers found out that some are getting roll out faster than the others, essentially splitting the group into 2, there will be a need for customer opt-in/opt-out.
If everyone is opting-out because of Friday, your Canary deployment becomes meaningless.
Any proof that other Cybersecurity vendors do Canary deployment for their AV definition? :)
PS: not to say that the company should test more internally...
Why even do that? We have virtualization, they could emulate real clients and networks of clients. This particular bug would have been prevented for sure
Yeah I thought maybe the VM thing might not catch the bug for some reason, but it seems like the natural thing to do. Spin up VM, see if there's a crash. I heard the technical reason had something to do with a file being full of nulls, but that sort of thing you should catch.
Honestly, the most generous excuse I can think of is that CS were informed of some sort of vulnerability that would have profound consequences immediately, and that necessitated a YOLO push. But even that doesn't seem too likely.
Agree, Crowdstrike was an unlucky one, but it is more about the issue in general. If I remember correctly, also others like sysdig user their own kernel modules for collection.
I still hold true that testing even improperly would have caught this before it hit worldwide. But I suppose you are right, that doesn’t help the argument being made here.