To avoid such issues in the future, CrowdStrike should prioritize rigorous testing across all supported configurations.
Bold of them to assume there's a future after a gazillion off incoming lawsuits.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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I was listening to a podcast earlier, and they mentioned the fact that their legal liability may, in fact, be limited because of specific wording in most of their contracts.
In other words, they may actually get away with this in the short term. In the long-term, however, a lot of organizations and governments that were hit by this will be reevaluating their reliance on such monolithic tech solutions as crowdstrike, and even Microsoft.
So you may be right, but not for the reasons you think.
and even Microsoft
(x) doubt
They had decades to consider Microsoft a liability. Why start doing something about it now?
Because cybersecurity is becoming more of a priority. The US government has really put their attention on it in the last few years.
I was in IT back in 2001 when the Code Red virus hit. It was a very similar situation where entire enterprises in totally unrelated fields were brought down. So many infected machines were still trying to replicate that corporate networks and Internet backbone routers were getting absolutely crushed.
Prior to that, trying to get real funding for securing networks was almost impossible. Suddenly security was the hottest topic in IT and corporations were throwing money at all the snake oil Silicon Valley could produce.
That lasted for a couple years, then things started going back to business as usual. Microsoft in particular was making all sorts of promises and boasts about how they made security their top priority, but that never really happened. Security remained something slapped on at the end of product development and was never allowed to interfere with producing products demanded by marketing with inherently insecure designs.
You're absolutely right. Everyone will be very worried and talk about the importance of security in the enterprise and yada yada yada until a cool new AI spreadsheet software comes out and everybody forgets to even check if their firewall is turned on.
But with that being said, if you have been looking for a good time to ask for cybersecuity funding at your org, see if you can't lock down 5 years worth of budget while everyone is aware of the risk to their businesses.
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Companies don't really use Debian or Rocky in widescale production because they have no support.
Now red hat or ubuntu is a different matter.
Honestly though this does point out that this is a pattern of behavior on crowdstrikes part. This should have been the canary in the coalmine.
I don’t know about that. In the HPC space we use a lot of EL distros. Mainly Centos & now Rocky. Most of the nodes run the os in ram too. Though almost all those kind of systems have no internet connection and don’t use things like crowdstrike. I’ve worked for a few places where the only part of the company that used windows was the office staff eg accounting, hr, etc. everything else is/was using an EL distro or upstream of one eg Fedora. Those type of places usually don’t mess things like crowdstrike for a lot of different reasons eg the kind of data they’re processing and security requirements on that data.
We use Alma, which is basically Rocky. Before that, CentOS. Lots of people don't need or want the expensive support contracts.
OSS support though donations and commits is the way to go unless you get value out of those contracts (we would not).
A lot of companies use debian
We actually use rocky and I think Debian at work for servers. We are currently migrating away from EOL centos .
But I've read so many posts on here about how Linux is flawless!
Are you shocked that bad software can crash multiple operating systems or something?
Nah, but there were some Linux evangelists claiming this couldn't possibly happen to Linux and it only happened to Windows because Windows is bad. And it was your own fault for getting this BSOD if you're still running Windows.
And sure, Windows bad and all, but this one wasn't really Microsofts fault.
Well, ever heard freeBSD?
Yeah, it supports kernel modules, so is also vulnerable to bad third party kernel code.
🤔if nobody makes a third party kernel module, then there is still no risk
Security through apathy!
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I'm not shocked at all, but there seems to be a very sizable number of people on Lemmy who think if people just used Linux there'd never be another problem or exploit again, which is ridiculous. Mac users used to feel the same way until the market share started to grow and all of the sudden you're seeing news of serious exploits.
not sure if you're being sarcastic, but if anything this news paints linux deployment in an even better light.
Haven't you heard 4% market is captured by Linux , it's the ONLY saviour os out there , windows users and macos users are idiots and all Lemmy Linux dudebros grandpa's are using Linux without single problem. Despite the fact that each Linux had it's own shell and there is no escape from terminal ( in 2024) if you even as try to use something more complicated. ;)
For almost every use case a normal user needs, there is a gui. You do not need the terminal.
Tell me where to find executables for programs installed without using Terminal , a very very clickable task in windows
Huh? if you install anything via a software manager which is included with most user-friendly distros like Ubuntu, popos, mint or zorin, it comes with a .desktop file which makes it discoverable by using the means of the desktop environment - usually something like the start menu. And that's not something new. That has been the case for years now.
/usr/bin
There, no clicking needed. 🙃
Hah not true in many many many cases
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Because Linux sysadmins know to test a fucking update before applying to the whole company
Linux admins know that you're worsening security when installing 3rd party stuff into kernel, so most of them tend to avoid it. And that's why no one noticed that Crowdstrike problem.
In April, a CrowdStrike update caused all Debian Linux servers in a civic tech lab to crash simultaneously and refuse to boot.
And then, you boot their servers from a Linux Live USB, run TimeShift to restore the last system snapshot, refuse the latest patch from Cloudstrike and they all lived happily ever after.
Good luck doing that remotely. Which is the sole problem with this most recent CrowdStrike bug.
And on Windows you booted in safe mode and removed one file. What's the point of your post?
None of these things are used in actual server operations.
And it's not much more difficult to fix on Windows, except for the scale of the problem.
boot their servers from a Linux live usb
If I ran a computer lab that wasn't already net booted, I'd use this as the motivating factor to put that in place. Net booting to a repair image, or just reinstalling the whole OS either from scratch or a known good disk image, is where anybody who manages a fleet of computers should be.
There was a point in time where I had a pxe boot server vm set up on my laptop that I used to reload servers in our little row of racks at 365 main, because it let me quickly swap out the boot iso, and was faster than usb sticks were at the time.
Additionally, organizations should approach CrowdStrike updates with caution
We would if we were able to control their "deployable content".
I read on another thread that an admin was emulating a testing environment by blocking CrowdStrike IPs on their firewall for the whole network before each update, with the exception of a couple machines. It's stupid that he has to do this but hey, his network was unaffected
Serious question, can you not? There isn't an option to...like...set a review system first?
For antivirus definitions? No, and you wouldn’t want to.
But it sounds like this added files / drivers or something, not just antivirus rules?
Turns out it was a content update that caused the driver to crash but the update itself wasn't a driver (as per their latest update.)
Found this post that explains what happened in detail: https://lemmy.ohaa.xyz/post/3522666
As an application developer (rather than someone who can/does code operating systems) I was just left open-mouthed …
Looks like they’re delivering “code as content” to get around the rigour of getting an updated driver authorised by MS. I realise they can’t wait too long for driver approval for antivirus releases but surely - surely - you have an ironclad QA process if you’re playing with fire like this.
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