CrowdStrike effectively bricked windows, Mac and Linux today.
Windows machines won’t boot, and Mac and Linux work is abandoned because all their users are on twitter making memes.
Incredible work.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Is there a good eli5 on what crowdstrike is, why it is so massively used, why it seems to be so heavily associated with Microsoft and what the hell happened?
Gonna try my best here:
Crowdstrike is an anti-virus program that everyone in the corporate world uses for their windows machines. They released a update that made the program fail badly enough that windows crashes. When it crashes like this, it tries to restart in case it fixes the issue, but here it doesn't, and computers get stuck in a loop of restarting.
Because anti-virus programs are there to prevent bad things from happening, you can't just automatically disable the program when it crashes. This means a lot of computers cannot start properly, which means you also cannot tell the computers to fix the problem remotely like you usually would.
The end result is a bunch of low level techs are spending their weekends manually going to each computer individually, and swapping out the bad update file so the computer can boot. It's a massive failure on crowdstrikes part, and a good reason you shouldn't outsource all your IT like people have been doing.
It's also a strong indicator that companies are not doing enough to protect their own infrastructure. Production servers shouldn't have third party software that auto-updates without going through a test environment. It's one thing to push emergency updates if there is a timely concern or vulnerability, but routine maintenance should go through testing before being promoted to prod.
Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company that makes security software for Windows. It apparently operates at the kernel-level, so it's running in the critical path of the OS. So if their software crashes, it takes Windows down with it.
This is very popular software. Many large entities including fortune 500 companies, transport authorities, hospitals etc. use this software.
They pushed a bad update which caused their software to crash, which took Windows down with it on an extremely large number of machines worldwide.
Hilariously bad.
if that's a "good" argument for you, then i've already heared that, and it nearly never really fits. here is another one for you that is an argument as generic as yours: "maybe try eating poo, trillions of flies cannot be wrong, poo is VERY popular food, much more popular than any human food !!! (as in mass per day as well as in its number of consumers)"
I wasn't making a case for adopting this software. Just pointing out that it is widely used, which is why it had such a wide effect.
I think you'll find most corporations would jump off a bridge if they saw their competitors jump.
so i misunderstood. sry then.
and yes, every company running an alltime-ever-in-news-due-to-critical-exploitable-bugs-in-the-mailclient already IS in freefall after that said jump.
So, do all windows machines use this, or do you have to add this software?
It's separate software; CrowdStrike is independent from Microsoft and it isn't a default component of Windows.
It’s interesting that Microsoft is getting a lot of flack from this.
Yeah, this isn't really the fault of windows.
Windows normalized running third party software as kernel level code.
Third parties love their trojans just being treated as normal way of life.
"Anti-cheats" instead of not being imbeciles while designing protocols for multiplayer, "anti-viruses" which need to run kernel-level and download databases with executable code, video drivers which just can't be packaged with Windows.
One thing I've realized is that large parts of social structure are dependent on cheating. We all want to cheat, so we all agree to a system where cheating is possible, but pretend it's not happening until someone gets caught and then just behave as if nothing happened.
One necessary part of someone's upbringing is honesty. There's an amazingly deep moment in LOTR where Eomer says that Rohirrim don't lie, so they are not easily deceived.
This is not a poetic device. This is how it works. Ponzi schemes usually target people who think they are smarter and more cunning and will gain something from them. And rigged security systems work because most of participants think they are the ones who may at some point abuse those systems, but most of them are the ones becoming eventually victims of such abuse.
I think it's much simpler: people don't know what they're doing, while CEOs want to make more money so don't do appropriate (expensive) practices.
I know it's not simpler because I've tested it in society a few times.
Also if you'd familiarized yourself with, as I said, the ways large-scale scams work, you'd notice this pattern too.
And propaganda.
And it's a common pattern in movies that the "good guys" can "hack" something or do something the shady way, and normies really do think that they'd be more comfortable with having that possibility. They see good secure systems as some kind of digital police state and don't understand that the existing world is much closer to that.
I'm not impartial, of course, my interest in these parts of human psychology comes from studying Nazi Germany, Armenian Genocide, trying to understand why Russian society is as it is and how to fix it, same for Armenian society, and, ahem, engaging in discussions about corruption with people benefiting from it.
In the latter case I was intentionally disallowing all aggressive emotions from my side and such and pretending to be naive and that we are all interested in a better world, and explaining how one can create systems where corrupt people don't multiply like cockroaches, and also arguing from the position of us all willing to solve problems allowing corruption and bendable rules to exist, and noting how stupid it is that someone absolutely unskilled in anything useful can benefit solely from occupying a right place, and that such critical points should be removed. Made them utterly furious and some other people, whom I considered kinda honest, rather unsympathetic to me.