System outage 7/19

What?

Yday, Microsoft experienced a global outage due to an issue with CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor software, causing widespread disruptions and triggering the 'Blue Screen of Death' on Windows PCs.

Computers with Mac and Linux operating systems were not impacted, and CrowdStrike said the incident was not caused by a cyberattack.

Who?

CEO George Kurtz, said the system was sent an update, and that update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system

Cybersecurity programs like CrowdStrike’s frequently and automatically update themselves to account for new tactics that malicious hackers have discovered. And there’s always a slight risk that any software update will be incompatible with other programs.

Why?

Logical system flow is depicted in the given diagram.

Where?

In computing, memory is organized as a large array of numbers, often represented in hexadecimal (base 16) for simplicity.

The patch attempted to read memory address 0x9c (156 in decimal), which is an invalid memory region. Any program that tries to read from this region is immediately terminated by Windows, as shown in the stack dump image.  Programmatically, it was caused by a NULL pointer reference in the code.

The affected code was part of a system driver, which has privileged access to the system hardware. When such a driver crashes, the operating system must immediately crash to protect the system, causing the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).

How?

CrowdStrike immediately published workaround steps for individual hosts and cloud environment at their portal https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/statement-on-falcon-content-update-for-windows-hosts/

5 years ago, importance of null pointer handler was inked at https://medium.com/trimble-maps-engineering-blog/nullable-business-value-91c31df8f20d 

Godmother of AI

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the renowned computer scientist known as the "godmother of AI", who has created a startup World Labs. In just four months, its already valued at more than $1 billion as per Financial Times

As Princeton University alumni, shared her vision for artificial intelligence (AI) 25 years ago. "This is a profound technology that will change human civilization" Li said from the same stage Albert Einstein discussed his theory of relativity in 1921. 

Li headed AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018 and currently advises the White House task force on AI.

In a Ted Talk in April, Li further explained the field of research her startup will work on advancing, which involves algorithms capable of realistically extrapolating images and text into three-dimensional environments and acting on those predictions, using a concept known as "spatial intelligence" 

This could bolster work in various fields such as robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, and computer vision. If these capabilities continue to advance in the ambitious ways Li plans, it has the potential to transform industries like healthcare and manufacturing.

The investment in World Labs reflects a trend where venture capitalists eagerly align themselves with ambitious AI companies, spurred by the surprise success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which rapidly achieved a valuation exceeding $80 billion.

Wiz acquisition

Google said to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for $23 billions, marking its biggest acquisition ever.

Wiz was founded in 2020 by the ex-Microsoft Azure security team (Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon C. & Roy R.) They had previously sold their business Adallom to Microsoft for $320Mn in 2015 after which they joined. 

After seeing first-hand the difficulty large companies faced to manage cloud security threats, co-founders raised $100Mn to start Wiz "to secure everything you Build and Run in the Cloud."

💰Wiz Funding timeline: 

• Series A (2020) - $100Mn (led by Index, Sequoia, Cyberstarts)
• Series B (2021)- $130Mn @ $1.7Bn valuation (led by Advent International) 
• Series B extension (2021) - $120Mn (led by Salesforce / Blackstone) 
• Series C (2021) - $250Mn @ $6Bn valuation (led by Insight & Greenoaks)
• Series D (2023) - $300Mn @ $10Bn valuation (led by Lightspeed, Greenoaks, Index)
• Series E (2024) - $1Bn @ $12Bn valuation (led by A16Z, Lightspeed & Thrive Capital) 

If this deal goes through, at $23 billions, it will be nearly double Google’s previous largest acquisition (of Motorola in 2011 for $12.5 billions) 

Sumologic isnotnull

This week encountered issue with the isnotnull() function in Sumo Logic. Its possible there was a misunderstanding or a mistake in the usage or context of the function.  Sumo Logic uses different syntax or methods to filter or check for null or existing fields.

To filter logs that have a specific field, such as ensuring logs contain a message field, typically usage of a query that implicitly checks for the presence of the field without directly using an isnotnull() function. 

Here's how it might adjust the query to ensure only working with logs that contain a message field:

_sourceCategory=yourSourceCategory

| json "message" as Message

| where !isNull(Message)

On receiving an error regarding isnotnull() or any function's existence, it might be due to a typo, case sensitivity, or Sumo Logic may not support the function as described. 

The correct function to use in Sumo Logic for checking if a field is not null is !isNull().