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Brian McInnis
Humanist, Futurist, Skeptic, Engineer
Brian McInnis, a highly accomplished engineer and management professional, has built an impressive career in the field of complex computer systems. With a solid educational background, including a Bachelor's of Engineering in Chemical Engineering from the prestigious University of California, Los Angeles, Brian has held several leadership positions at top companies such as Yahoo and System1. His expertise in large-scale system engineering, architecture, Linux, Apache, Quality Assurance, Performance Engineering, and Scripting make him a valuable asset to companies looking to build high-performance systems. Brian has successfully managed remote teams across different locations and has a proven track record of delivering top-quality results. His passion for engineering and deep knowledge of various programming languages such as Perl, Shell Scripting, C, and C++ has earned him respect from his peers and made him a go-to person for complex system issues.
Highlights
The Crowdstrike code broke because 20 things and 21 things are not the same and when they didn't match they blew up computers worldwide.
I explained to my wife what Crowdstrike did to take down everything and she said I should post the simple explanation.
Crowdstrike put out the a description of what they messed up in their code and as an engineer, it is so believable.
Major problems occur at the interfaces where 2 different engineers are working on code and both make reasonable assumptions, but those assumptions don't match.
It is at those points where you end up getting gaps in your test coverage, your unit testing covers the issues that you know about and you don't think about how someone external is going to mess things up.
This situation is where dedicated test personnel are critical, cause you need someone thinking about this stuff that isn't directly doing the work. Even with people who are dedicated to testing, it can be hard to address integrations as they require more hardware that needs to be dedicated to the work and companies don't like to pay for test beds.
"The sensor expected 20 input fields, while the update provided 21 input fields. In this instance, the mismatch resulted in an out-of-bounds memory read, causing a system crash. Our analysis, together with a third-party review, confirmed this bug is not exploitable by a threat actor."
