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> PATCHING OF KNOWN CRITICAL SECURITY VULNERABILITIES IMMEDIATELY. I worked in system admin for many years. If anyone was actually foolish enough to do this, t

> PATCHING OF KNOWN CRITICAL SECURITY VULNERABILITIES IMMEDIATELY. I worked in system admin for many years. If anyone was actually foolish enough to do this, they would be dealing with multiple major outages every year. > for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.

georgebarnett 9y ago
"There might be an outage" is the stupidest reason I have ever heard to advocate not applying security patches. There's plenty of companies that are able to regularly patch and upgrade software, incident free. If you team isn't able to do this, they need to fix their process instead of putting their head in the sand.
- wavegeek 9y ago
  > stupid I am not defending the totality of EFX's process by any means. I am just pointing out that "install every high severity patch right away" is not as easy as it looks. Others have pointed out this patch was not available for all current versions, for example. So, to install the patch you need to upgrade. Oh, that breaks <dependency>. So we need to upgrade <other thing>. But that regresses a feature we use .... The major issue with EFX was the fragility of their overall architecture. A single weakness should not be enough to lay the whole DBMS open.
  - speedplane 9y ago
    The tech industry has to move more towards declarative systems, rather than procedural ones. Docker, Kubernetes and similar tech can auto-update in the background without any downtime. It's impossible to maintain thousands of VMs without some sort of declarative system.
    - qaq 9y ago
      Each thing you are listing increases complexity and attack surface.
      - speedplane 9y ago
        It actually decreases complexity. Updating 1000 VM servers using these technologies can be made automatic. True, it provides an additional attack surface, but the gains of having everything always patched are well worth it.
        qaq 9y ago
        Everything does not include your actual app, so yes it's convenient but doesn't really help that much
        speedplane 9y ago
        I'd argue that convenience is a security feature. The easier something is to do, the fewer mistakes you or your team will make. Stand by my initial post, declarative systems will become more and more popular and will improve security.
    - thehardsphere 9y ago
      What is the non-tech industry supposed to do?
  - georgebarnett 9y ago
    There are great reasons for not installing patches right away. "There might be an outage" is not one of them.
- edwhitesell 9y ago
  I don't recall being at, or working with, a company where this wasn't _the_ reason patches were delayed at least some period if time. Companies are driven by profit; unknown patches can negatively affect profit and are usually treated as such. Alternatively, there are sometimes political reasons. A director may not want to risk an outage for fear of being dressed down by their VP. Any change to a production environment comes with risks, sometimes having a security risk is judged to be lower risk than making a change. I've seen this from small startups to multi-billion dollar companies. Ignoring these factors is also putting your head in the sand.
  - dopamean 9y ago
    > Alternatively, there are sometimes political reasons. A director may not want to risk an outage for fear of being dressed down by their VP. This is such a weird thing to me. I've never worked anywhere like this and so I have a hard time imagining it really. Wouldn't that same director get more than dressed down by the VP if on their watch a _known security vulnerability_ was ignored and the system was breached? I just can't understand this way of thinking.
    - thehardsphere 9y ago
      It's easy to understand once you get just how simplistic it is. The VP will deliver a dressing down if the company loses money and the blame can be placed on the director. The cost of an outage is very easy to quantify (revenue per minute the system is down), and the probability that something will go wrong while applying the patch is also somewhat easy to predict, and usually greater than zero. The director will be blamed with certainty for the outage, since he approved it. The cost of a security breach is difficult to quantify; it depends on what gets breached and how bad. Note here, I say breach, not vulnerability. Even if there is a known security vulnerability, it's not immediately obvious in all systems what the consequence will be; there may be other mitigations in place outside of software that reduce the potential damage, or there may be unknown vulnerabilities that are exploitable due to the known vulnerability that make would make a breach worse. The lack of certainty about the consequences means it's also possible for the director to avoid blame if the breach is minor ("how was I supposed to know that other team is still using MD5?"). If there is no breach, then there is nothing for the director to be blamed for. Given that the director would like to avoid being dressed down, director will be more inclined to delay patching over possibly causing an outage, because the costs of an outage are easy to predict and he will take all blame for it. The breach may never happen and even if it does, it may cost him personally less than the outage. If this still seems weird, it might be because you are someone who views patching as an easy thing to do, because you probably work for a software company. Software companies are used to managing changing software, and have all kinds of practices around minimizing the risks of doing so. Non-software companies typically find patching to be hard and costly because their core business is something else; changes can disturb the "something else."
cookiecaper 9y ago
While you may sort of have a point for low-severity issues (if you patch every one ASAP, you are constantly restarting; should be tested in a group in stage and released to prod on a regular timeline), this was a 10.0 severity CVE and it is _definitely_ the kind of issue that you tolerate some downtime for. Check out the CVE, this could be exploited by anyone with a basic knowledge of cURL in 60 seconds or less. The vulnerability was just a matter of sending an arbitrary command in an HTTP header.
notzorbo3 9y ago
You need to do some testing of course. "IMMEDIATELY" doesn't mean within 5 seconds. If you can't properly apply security updates in a reasonable time frame without it leading to major outages, something is extremely wrong with either the architecture, the chosen software or the QA and deployment strategy. > without it leading to major outages I think I would have preferred an outage over leaking millions of american's private information.
- wavegeek 9y ago
  > I think I would have preferred an outage over leaking millions of american's private information. With full 100% hindsight vision, of course.
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    No you don't need hindsight for that. Protecting the data is more important than anything else. It's negligent to not do so.
  - mi100hael 9y ago
    It's not the first time this has happened to a company, and it surely won't be the last. We've already had full 100% hindsight vision a dozen times over, and plenty of companies have chosen to ignore it.

georgebarnett 9y ago

"There might be an outage" is the stupidest reason I have ever heard to advocate not applying security patches. There's plenty of companies that are able to regularly patch and upgrade software, incident free. If you team isn't able to do this, they need to fix their process instead of putting their head in the sand.

wavegeek 9y ago
> stupid I am not defending the totality of EFX's process by any means. I am just pointing out that "install every high severity patch right away" is not as easy as it looks. Others have pointed out this patch was not available for all current versions, for example. So, to install the patch you need to upgrade. Oh, that breaks <dependency>. So we need to upgrade <other thing>. But that regresses a feature we use .... The major issue with EFX was the fragility of their overall architecture. A single weakness should not be enough to lay the whole DBMS open.
- speedplane 9y ago
  The tech industry has to move more towards declarative systems, rather than procedural ones. Docker, Kubernetes and similar tech can auto-update in the background without any downtime. It's impossible to maintain thousands of VMs without some sort of declarative system.
  - qaq 9y ago
    Each thing you are listing increases complexity and attack surface.
    - speedplane 9y ago
      It actually decreases complexity. Updating 1000 VM servers using these technologies can be made automatic. True, it provides an additional attack surface, but the gains of having everything always patched are well worth it.
      - qaq 9y ago
        Everything does not include your actual app, so yes it's convenient but doesn't really help that much
        speedplane 9y ago
        I'd argue that convenience is a security feature. The easier something is to do, the fewer mistakes you or your team will make. Stand by my initial post, declarative systems will become more and more popular and will improve security.
  - thehardsphere 9y ago
    What is the non-tech industry supposed to do?
- georgebarnett 9y ago
  There are great reasons for not installing patches right away. "There might be an outage" is not one of them.
edwhitesell 9y ago
I don't recall being at, or working with, a company where this wasn't _the_ reason patches were delayed at least some period if time. Companies are driven by profit; unknown patches can negatively affect profit and are usually treated as such. Alternatively, there are sometimes political reasons. A director may not want to risk an outage for fear of being dressed down by their VP. Any change to a production environment comes with risks, sometimes having a security risk is judged to be lower risk than making a change. I've seen this from small startups to multi-billion dollar companies. Ignoring these factors is also putting your head in the sand.
- dopamean 9y ago
  > Alternatively, there are sometimes political reasons. A director may not want to risk an outage for fear of being dressed down by their VP. This is such a weird thing to me. I've never worked anywhere like this and so I have a hard time imagining it really. Wouldn't that same director get more than dressed down by the VP if on their watch a _known security vulnerability_ was ignored and the system was breached? I just can't understand this way of thinking.
  - thehardsphere 9y ago
    It's easy to understand once you get just how simplistic it is. The VP will deliver a dressing down if the company loses money and the blame can be placed on the director. The cost of an outage is very easy to quantify (revenue per minute the system is down), and the probability that something will go wrong while applying the patch is also somewhat easy to predict, and usually greater than zero. The director will be blamed with certainty for the outage, since he approved it. The cost of a security breach is difficult to quantify; it depends on what gets breached and how bad. Note here, I say breach, not vulnerability. Even if there is a known security vulnerability, it's not immediately obvious in all systems what the consequence will be; there may be other mitigations in place outside of software that reduce the potential damage, or there may be unknown vulnerabilities that are exploitable due to the known vulnerability that make would make a breach worse. The lack of certainty about the consequences means it's also possible for the director to avoid blame if the breach is minor ("how was I supposed to know that other team is still using MD5?"). If there is no breach, then there is nothing for the director to be blamed for. Given that the director would like to avoid being dressed down, director will be more inclined to delay patching over possibly causing an outage, because the costs of an outage are easy to predict and he will take all blame for it. The breach may never happen and even if it does, it may cost him personally less than the outage. If this still seems weird, it might be because you are someone who views patching as an easy thing to do, because you probably work for a software company. Software companies are used to managing changing software, and have all kinds of practices around minimizing the risks of doing so. Non-software companies typically find patching to be hard and costly because their core business is something else; changes can disturb the "something else."

cookiecaper 9y ago

While you may sort of have a point for low-severity issues (if you patch every one ASAP, you are constantly restarting; should be tested in a group in stage and released to prod on a regular timeline), this was a 10.0 severity CVE and it is _definitely_ the kind of issue that you tolerate some downtime for. Check out the CVE, this could be exploited by anyone with a basic knowledge of cURL in 60 seconds or less. The vulnerability was just a matter of sending an arbitrary command in an HTTP header.

notzorbo3 9y ago

You need to do some testing of course. "IMMEDIATELY" doesn't mean within 5 seconds. If you can't properly apply security updates in a reasonable time frame without it leading to major outages, something is extremely wrong with either the architecture, the chosen software or the QA and deployment strategy. > without it leading to major outages I think I would have preferred an outage over leaking millions of american's private information.

wavegeek 9y ago
> I think I would have preferred an outage over leaking millions of american's private information. With full 100% hindsight vision, of course.
- muninn_ 9y ago
  No you don't need hindsight for that. Protecting the data is more important than anything else. It's negligent to not do so.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  It's not the first time this has happened to a company, and it surely won't be the last. We've already had full 100% hindsight vision a dozen times over, and plenty of companies have chosen to ignore it.