The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.
The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.
I hope you’re joking. If anything, Rust makes error handling easier by returning them as values using the
Resultmonad. As someone else pointed out, they literally usedunwrapin their code, which basically means “panic if this ever returns error”. You don’t do this unless it’s impossible to handle the error inside the program, or if panicking is the behavior you want due to e.g. security reasons.Even as an absolute amateur, whenever I post any Rust to the public, the first thing I do is get rid of
unwrapas much as possible, unless I intentionally want the application to crash. Even then, I useexpectinstead ofunwrapto have some logging. This is definitely the work of some underpaid intern.Also, Python is sloooowwww.
I was joking, but oof it did not go over well.