the good news is that it does make windows more secure. you cant hack something that has crashed.
Remember guys, it took about a decade for Solar Winds to discover somebody had root access to everybody that used their software, another decade for somebody outside Solar Winds to discover it and tell everybody, and half a decade with nobody claiming to have solved the issue up to now.
So when you believe that your computer with an EDS is safe just because you can’t use it, think again.
EDS?
It’s an oops.
It should be IDS.
That’s intrusion detection system, right?
Yep.
But there also exists Endpoint Detection and Prevention System, Intrusion Prevention System, Enterprise Security system, Network Threat Detection, Network Threat Prevention… And all those things name the exact same products (or at least, products you buy bundled on the same package).
Somehow I managed to use the one acronym that is wrong.
WAF is my favorite. It sounds so goofy.
The most secure computer is the one not running any software. That’s why I recommend Crowdstrike.
Reminds me of a local cyber security firm, which declares war on a group of hackers. The CEO went on television to “double dog dare” the hackers to hack their servers and claim their firewalls are impenetrable.
Well you can guess the results, within 48 hours, their servers went down one after another. And when shit about to hit the fan, they literally turned off all of their servers for days. They hired a 3rd party IT firm to patch their security, then the CEO declared victory in a local newspaper.
Similar thing happened to the idiot CEO of Lifelock that used to advertise his actual social security number everywhere.
I used to work at Equifax. LifeLock was the subject of many corporate trainings.
A smarter person would have used a fake SSN then claimed success when it never worked
And the hackers name? 4chan
The fact that random companies like Crowdstrike have kernel drivers in millions of computers they they ship remotely is a security risk in and of itself. We’re lucky crowdstrike just shipped a bug that crashes computers, other companies could have shipped a lot worse.
other companies could have shipped a lot worse.
other
companiesgovernments could have shipped a lot worse.FTFY
other
companiesgovernmentscould havemay have already shipped a lot worse.FTFY (high five!)
I’d swap may out for probably TBH.
I HATE UEFI I HATE UEFI I HATE UEFI
I HATE UEFI I HATE UEFI I HATE UEFI
So say, we all.
Why do you hate UEFI? Do you hate security?
Oh yeah, I really hate security. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/07/researchers-unpack-unkillable-uefi-rootkit-that-survives-os-reinstalls/
Sure, there are vulnerabilities. But UEFI offers features such as secure boot, which BIOS doesn’t. Also, its nice being able to boot from drives larger then 2tb.
Not saying BIOS is better.
I’d laugh if this wasn’t affecting me directly.
I can laugh either for or at you, if you want.
I’ll pour one out for the frontliners.
I laugh and it does/did(over now) affect me. Bwahaha. Im getting work done and nobody can interrupt with email.
All I’ve noticed is that a lot of internet related things in my work are much faster today.
The schadenfreude could only be sweeter if my company used CrowdStrike on all the Windows systems. Then I really would have had a very peaceful focused day.
I really don’t want to be the guy responsible for this fuck up
For a company this big it would also have to have gotten past a code review and QA team, right? … right? …
Of course, of course. This is how these things are always done.
I like how they kept on pushing the update for hours
And who pushes out production updates on a Friday!
We do.
“If something goes down over the weekend, fewer people see it” - my leadership team.
I guess Asia can report the problem on Sunday and I’ll get a nastygram and fix it that afternoon.
“Security”
Code review, QA team, hours of being baked on an internal test network, incremental exponential roll out to the world, starting slow so that any problems can be immediately rolled back. If they didn’t have those basics, they have no business being a tech company, let alone a security company who puts out windows drivers.
Yeah, something this big is absolutely not one engineer’s fault. Even if that engineer maliciously pushed an update, it’s not their fault — it was a complete failure of the organization, and one person having the ability to wreck havoc like this is the failure.
And I actually have some amount of hope that, in this case, it is being recognized as such.
I agree but they will still blame it all on that one guy.
No they won’t, not if they’re in the slightest bit competent.
Blameless post-mortem culture is very common at big IT organizations. For a fuck-up this size, there are going to be dozens of problems identified, from bad QA processes, to bad code review processes, to bad documentation, to bad corner cases in tools.
There will probably be some guy (or gal) who pushed the button, but unless what that person did was utterly reckless (like pushing an update while high or drunk, or pushing a change then turning off her phone and going dark, or whatever) the person who pushed the button will probably be a legend to their peers. Even if they made a big mistake, if they followed standard procedures while doing it, almost everyone will recognize they’re not at fault, they just got to be the unlucky person who pushed the button this time.
This is an industry wide issue. This is just the first symptom.
What we need is to stop the blind trust
Yeah and that means they won’t nail some poor schmuck to the wall over this?
He’ll just get fired, apply somewhere else, and they’ll only know the dates he worked at CrowdStrike.
If anybody cared, they would have switched away from M$ by now.
The problem is the blind trust of these “vendors”
Decentralize control
Centralize control in house.
Compared to the status quo, that’s much more decentralized.
Also: don’t trust your employees to boot into safe mode.
Trust a 3rd party to freely install system level files at any time.I knew how to fix the computers at work today in the morning, but we couldn’t get through to the help desk to get the bit locker codes for each computer until near the end of the day.
Also: don’t trust your employees to boot into safe mode. Trust a 3rd party to freely install system level files at any time.
Exactly. This is exactly the problem, and unless people wisen up the software security problem is only going to get worse. Companies and Governments need to rethink how they approach security entirely. This is a preview of what is to come, its only going to get worse and more damaging from here, and none of the vendors care.
Companies and Governments need to rethink how they approach security entirely. This is a preview of what is to come, its only going to get worse and more damaging from here, and none of the vendors care.
It is easy one for goverments. Ban security through obscurity. As well proprietary security software.
Moonbutt’s moonbuck))) Have I seen you somewhere?
Ban security through obscurity. As well proprietary security software.
The government likes proprietary software. They are never going to ban it.
I’m pretty sure Windows is plenty secure. It isn’t private or usercentric but of on a security perspective it isn’t bad.
Linux has plenty of security problems just like any OS
Defending Windows in a linux memes community.
That’s a bold move cotton, let’s see how that works out for 'em
TBH regardless of windows security, this was clearly the fault of a lack of compatibility. Whether CrowdStrike was made in a way that caused the problem or if the Windows update wasn’t properly screened or tested for this kind of failure, I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot about very soon, but the jury is out on which one is at fault.
Nah, CS sent out a virus definition update that included a driver file that was fucked and caused a boot loop. Because it was a virus definition it bypassed staging rules set by customers. It’s 100% on CS unless we want to talk about how Windows architectural choices on how it handles loading improperly formatted kernel level drivers. CS also caused issues on Linux not too long ago.
Why can’t we talk about improperly formatted kernel level drivers? MS is notorious for “oops” accidentally rolling drivers back 8 or more years, and now it’s become a problem.
And correct me if I’m wrong but the CS update came before the windows update which caused the problems.
EDIT: I am a bit off the mark
On 19 July at 04:09 UTC, CrowdStrike distributed a driver update for its Falcon software for Windows PCs and servers. An update to a configuration file that was responsible for screening named pipes, Channel File 291, caused a logic error with the Windows sensor client, causing affected machines to enter the blue screen of death with the stop code PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA, indicating an error caused by a page fault.
I’m pretty sure Windows is plenty secure.
Haha sure. Windows NT MIGHT be considered ‘secure’ from an architectural standpoint but literally of this falls apart when you tape all the Microsoft Dark Patterns on it that ruin the security. Its a joke, and that’s the entire problem.
Think: Microsoft Accounts, now the “secure” Windows NT Local User Authentication is effectively backdoored by MS and makes you vulnerable to phishing attacks. Windows Update: Constantly pushing dark patterns and ‘features’ that it discourages people from updating so then guess what, people don’t update! The fact that Windows so easily allows Crowdstrike to make system level changes like this without trying a whiny fit is also apart of it. Think about the fact how easily Microsoft allows stuff like Valorant anti-cheat and Crowdstrike, which are effectively rootkits, to be installed with one UAC prompt. In reality this issue is not really Microsoft’s fault directly, but in a bunch of indirect ways they encourage this and allow it to happen, and we have seen time and time again, Microsoft DOES NOT CARE ABOUT SECURITY.
If anything this “Crowdstrike” software showcases the endemic problem in software security and how our system is failing and continuing to fail us. Its an anti-virus, but we already HAVE Windows Defender. These corporations should not be using some random 3rd party Antivirus, I doubt it even does much good, its just cargo-culting “oh, this is industry standard, so we have to use it.” This is the kind of thinking/approach that Microsoft encourages.
Well an organization shouldn’t be giving end users admin. That’s a recipe for disaster. From an updates perspective you can tightly control which update is applied and when.
Microsoft makes some crappy decisions but they do know who there big customers are.
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Just remember to take off on 2038-01-19
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Does it not have epoch set to
1970-01-01 00:00:00
? Or does the PDP-11 only use a non power of 2 number of bits, and you’ve already set the clock back before? Genuinely curious, never heard of 2029 problem before.deleted by creator
“Air gapped”… in my day we called that the sneaker net.
Username kinda ckecks out
More like ClownStrike.
Cloudstriked
They striked all right
Sometimes you have to learn the hard way…
Ha guess why I’m on lemmy right now.
They stop breaches if nothing’s turned on. Roll safe (mode)
Unfortunately, heads are going to roll, and it’ll probably be the little guy who gets the blame.
I’m actually curious to know, how is Linux inherently more secure than windows?
Few things, in rough order:
-
Smaller = less attack surface. You can strip a Linux OS down to only what is needed.
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Open source, so it’s can be peered review. There are Unix distros like OpenBSD, that share lot of user space component options, where auditing is a big thing. The whole sunlight and oxygen stops things festering as much. As abosed to things locked in a box in another box down in a cellar.
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Open source transparency forces corporates to be better. We can see what they are and aren’t doing.
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Diversity. The is no “Linux”, it’s a ecosystem of Linux distros all built and configured differently, using different components. Think of Linux as just a type of base board in a sea of Unix Lego bits. There are plenty of big deployments on BSD bases that share a lot with some Linux deployments.
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Unix security is simplier than Windows security, so easer to not mess up.
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Its not and everyone who says it does is full of shit. The reason linux doesnt need av is that av is secretly overrated
In general it is. Opensource software has less bugs that proprietary. And even those bugs can be mitigated with hardening.
That’s…a gross oversimplification. Super popular open source projects tend to have few bugs from the sheer number of contributors available to fix them, but active proprietary software has dedicated teams working fulltime every week to deal woth issues. Proprietary stuff is often way wider in scope than open source, so more surface for bugs to creep in. Scope and team size have a lot more to do with bug density than open vs closed source.
I don’t know how much effort thoose proprietary software companies put into the actual software. Why is windows so shit? Why is whatsapp buggy? They try to get money with shit software with no optimisations at all.
How many open source projects have 50 million lines of code like Windows, or legal agreements related to backwards compatibility and version support guarantees?
A for-profit company is going to focus on whatever generates revenue, sure. But crappy software will lose customers in a non-monopoly scenario. They’re not exactly incentivized to make broken things nobody wants.
They are neither incentivised to make quality of life improvements to their software. Thats why i hate most of them
It’s not, in fact out of the box Linux is SIGNIFICANTLY more insecure than windows.
The thing is, hackers and hack tool makers target the largest market segment to gain the most conversions.
Apple users used to gush about how virus proof they were until they hit decent market share, and then they got plenty of malware.
Same thing with Linux but the real difference is you need a few decades of linux experience to fix anything in a timely manner.
Linux is SIGNIFICANTLY more insecure than windows.
Absolutely not true. I assume you don’t have a source for this? Besides your butt…?
UPDATE:: They did not have a source.
Does Linux come out of the box with A/V and firewalls?
On second thought, you’re dismissive little aside just convinced me to excise you from my internet experience for all eternity.
Ta…
AV is a bandaid for the horrible way software is handled in Windows. Linux is far from perfect, but package repositories are such a step up when it comes to security.
There is still the need to add repositories and download packages from the web every so often though. I don’t see why AV isn’t more common. It doesn’t stop the more clever and up to date attacks, but some protection from the simple things wouldn’t hurt.
I try not to argue with cultists. Have a day.
Living up to their username…
What a dumb argument. You have to configure firewall rules for Windows and Linux. That is like the first thing any competent admin will do, no matter what OS they are working with…
Question, how is Linux more insecure out of the box?
It isn’t. Most distro’s leave the firewall disabled on install but what services are exposed? None. Most are set to localhost only and ssh is normally not installed or enabled. Antivirus on windows especially defender just seems to keep me from doing my job. For instance every decent utility from nirsoft is detected by defender as being infected. I suspect microsoft hates those utilities that allow you to back up credentials and most critically license keys.
I do agree that the main thing that keeps linux from being as easily exploited is the more about the average linux user and less about inherent security. I’ve only had one Linux machine exploited in thirty years and it was a older version of Debian that a vendor disabled the automatic updates on when it was installed. I woke one morning to 10gb of upstream traffic on my traffic graphs. The attacker had gained access through a outdated version of apache. The fools who had compromised the system couldn’t understand why he had to work through a rdp session to reinstall his product when I reloaded it with the latest version. The fool was pissed that I had updated debian. My boss pressed them until they agreed it was time to let debian 7 go since the latest at the time was debian 9.
But in the end the breach happened because of a foolish vendor with outdated ideas regarding updating a OS.
Does it come preinstalled with an antivirus and a firewall?
Does windows come preinstalled and preconfigured with more potentially vulnerable software on open ports?
I personally don’t value an antivirus that much, since it can only protect you from known threats, and even then, it only matters when you’re already getting compromised - but fair point for Windows, I suspect most distros come without antivirus preinstalled and preconfigured.
A firewall, on the other hand, only has value if you already have insecure services listening on your system - and I’m pretty sure on Windows those services aren’t gonna be blocked by the default settings. All that said though… Most Linux distros come with a firewall, something like iptables or firewalld, though not sure which ones would have it preconfigured for blocking connections by default.
So while I would dispute both of those points as not being that notable, I feel like other arguments in favor of Linux still stand, like reduced surface area, simpler kernel code, open and auditable source.
One big issue with Linux security for consumers (which I have to assume is what you’re talking about, since on the server side a sysadmin will want to configure any antivirus and firewall anyways) could be that different distributions will have different configurations - both for security and for preference-based things like desktop environments. This does unfortunately mean that users could find themselves installing less secure distros without realizing it, choosing them for their looks/usage patterns.
Answering a question with a question is an instant block you rude af windowlicker
Man, and here I put too much effort writing a reply to a troll 😔
Same…
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target the largest market segment to gain the most conversions.
Windows market share is bigger in desktop only. In fact, is kinda sad that still there are serious institutions using Windows for non-desktop stuff. I hope this incident changes it.
the real difference is you need a few decades of linux experience to fix anything in a timely manner.
[ citation needed ] Probably you are meaning desktop again. Although troubleshooting Windows is not easy task neither, there are way more desktop users familiar with it.
The real thing is
-
- There is no single “linux” OS. There are lots of different OSes based on Linux kernel. And they are for servers, desktop, embedded systems, smartphones, etc.
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- More important. Security is a process, not a product from a vendor. The root cause of this incident is that some institutions are seeing that you just buy “security”, install it, and call it a day. No important stuff should auto-update. And no institution should auto-update lots of important stuff at the same time.
So, Linux is not really more secure. But is built in a culture where security is taken more seriously.
-
Sort of an aside, but I am seeing Microsoft more as a hostile entity that I need to protect myself from.
In addition to what others have said, there’s the move towards containerized applications on Linux via flatpaks, immutable distributions, and snapshots/rollbacks. There are also distributions like Debian with a delayed package release schedule for added stability and security. Its my understanding that you could have an exceptionally secure, effectively trustless, Linux system beyond what is possible on Mac or Windows.
It isn’t.
However security software for Linux usually doesn’t operate in kernel level usually. And it doesn’t brick your bios.
That being said because of how Linux works it is much more possible to safe a bricked Linux machine than a Windows machine.
If you follow the philosophy that it follows, that is, giving the least possible permission to any application, to make it work, it easily becomes much more secure than Windows.
On the other hand, if you log into your GUI desktop as root, Bill Gates save you.
Because you can own your system and inspect and alter all of it in case it’s needed.
I think this is a misconception.
In the 90s it may have been true - windows was focused on user experience on the desktop. Pre- internet, security just wasn’t relevant.
Even in that era though, Linux was running on servers in universities et cetera managing many users.
I guess this is where the reputation arose.
These days I don’t think either is inherently more secure than another in a general sense.
For specific uses cases one might be more “reliable” than another just because it’s used more and therefore has more people looking at it. For example, the vast majority of Web servers are in a Linux environment, but the vast majority of on premise email servers would be Windows.
What I’m saying is, in 2024 the general security of each platform is going to be comparable, and only a very small component in your chain of reliability. Like if you develop a threat model, and write policies, and maintain behaviours in practice, the underlying security provided by the environment isn’t really that relevant.