I'm seeing some real time, grade-A consent manufacturing regarding this massive crowdstrike outage. Every article I see blames Microsoft. I have no love for Microsoft, but they were not to blame. The people who are too blame are crowdstrike, the software company who deployed the broken update that caused the outage.

* Puts on immaculately thought out tinfoil hat *

Crowdstrike is more a piece of US surveillance tech than it is an actual security suite. In essence it can take any data from a device it is installed on and can execute any command on those devices (due to the way the software very tightly integrated with the windows operating system, bypassing security on the OS). A powerful tool when you consider that the US government can subpoena any us corporation to hand over the information they hold.

Now, crowdstrike had a huge market share, but you can bet that after this event people are going to be less willing to use it, and this will result in the US losing a huge part of its surveillance network. People don't care what security suite they use, so long as it works, so people are going to switch.

Cue the absolute deluge of articles I've been seeing blaming this on Microsoft. An operating system so ingrained into the business world that no-one is going to switch to an alternative, no matter how much they fuck up. They can take the heat and mitigate the damage to crowdstrike. Thus preserving the US state surveillance appetatus.

* Tin foil hat removed and placed back into its extremely well thought out box *

What do people think?

  • EatPotatoes [none/use name]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Good luck trying to get over the ingrained security by obscurity notion that open source software is vulnerable by the nature of source code being widely readable. This isn’t business type brain worms but the IT workers and consultants who can’t manage a server unless it has the same attack surface of a desktop interface they have used their whole lives.

    Network booting or VDI are criminally underrated. This shouldn’t happen but when it does and you have thousand of endpoints that fail it should be as easy to going back to a previous snapshot. Especially with the latest in atomic updates like silver blue or micro os.

    As for web services. I still mourn unikernals. Fight me.