101–110 of 250 posts
We blame car manufacturers for defects from suppliers, but we don't blame platform manufacturers (Microsoft) for holes in their architecture?
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Should endpoint protection require kernel level access? At what point does it stop becoming protection and start becoming a liability? Obligatory who watches/protects the watchmen/protector...
How else would you monitor a windows box? EU won't allow Microsoft to lock down their kernel and provide MacOS type solution with APIs for trust publishers.
I'm still amazed how the blame shifted from Microsoft to CrowdStrike. Yes, CrowdStrike update caused that -- but applications fail all the time. It was Microsoft's oversight to put it on Windows critical path. And banks/airlines etc were hit hard because their _Windows_ didn't boot, not because of an application crash on a perfectly working Windows.
If I sell you a bike and you remove the breaks you can’t sue me when you crash.
Any OS which allows users to do what they generally want to do, also allows users to fubar their own systems.
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Management decides to use Crowdstrike, not IT, and IT has no way to rollout updates in controlled fashion. So not really a failure of IT, at least not for this reason.
My comment assumes that the IT department (including its executive) gets to make these sort decisions - why wouldn't they?
I like the technical stuff here. I'm not so sure about this: > money is core societal infrastructure, like the power grid and transportation systems are. It would be really bad if hackers working for a foreign government could just turn off money. Sure, it would be inconvenient in the short term. But I think the current design is holding us back. I suspect that most of us would have more to gain than to lose if we ma…
In the short term people would probably starve to death.
The takeaway from this article seems to be: buy crowdstrike shares, because major corps are unable to make any changes, and will continue to pay licensing fees for this "service" for the foreseeable future.
The lawsuits alone are going to be eyewatering. But sure, buy those shares.
Maybe the IT departments at the affected orgs take solace in the fact that so many other orgs had issues that the heat is off - but in my opinion this was still a failure of IT itself. There's no reason that update should have been pushed automatically to the entire fleet. If Crowdstrike's software doesn't give you a way to rollout updates on a portion of your network before the entire fleet, it shouldn't be used.
The update bypassed the controls orgs had in place to defer/schedule updates, AFAIK.
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Ironically, this is exactly the failure pattern that the changes in Chrome extensions to manifest v3 try to prevent. You can't provide a guarantee to the end-user of pre-vetted safety when the application is downloading and executing arbitrary code from a third-party source. That's like expecting a static code verifier to prevent all runtime errors. It is, perhaps, a guarantee that no vendor should be expected to mak…
> You can't provide a guarantee to the end-user of pre-vetted safety when the application is downloading and executing arbitrary code from a third-party source. So a web browser can't be trusted or certified, ever. Unless JavaScript is disabled?
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Couldn't you just ask some OS APIs provided by something in kernelspace for what you need? In fact, isn't this how macOS does things?
You could, and in fact this is what Microsoft wanted to do. The EU said that they couldn't. And the reason why not is simple. Anything that Microsoft thinks is a good thing to add to the API, they'll add for themselves. When the new API is released, their software is released with it. This gives them a competitive advantage over competitors who have to wait for Microsoft to have the idea that they want, and then scra…
I'm still amazed how the blame shifted from Microsoft to CrowdStrike. Yes, CrowdStrike update caused that -- but applications fail all the time. It was Microsoft's oversight to put it on Windows critical path. And banks/airlines etc were hit hard because their _Windows_ didn't boot, not because of an application crash on a perfectly working Windows.
Is there any merit to Microsoft's argument that the EU forced them into keeping their kernel accessible by 3rd parties? https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/22/windows_crowdstrike_k...
Microsoft, interestingly enough, is working on a project to add an eBPF[0] runtime to the NT kernel. If they were to use this for their own security products then I doubt the EU would prohibit them from transitioning third-party security products to eBPF programs. Antitrust and competition law do not care about specific technical measures competitors use to compete, just that dominant companies are not shutting competitors out of markets.
[0] Formerly "extended Berkley Packet Filter", eBPF lets you run safety-verified code in kernel space. Notably, the verifier isn't just a signing check, it can actually ensure the code won't crash the kernel directly.