This isn’t a gloat post. In fact, I was completely oblivious to this massive outage until I tried to check my bank balance and it wouldn’t log in.

Apparently Visa Paywave, banks, some TV networks, EFTPOS, etc. have gone down. Flights have had to be cancelled as some airlines systems have also gone down. Gas stations and public transport systems inoperable. As well as numerous Windows systems and Microsoft services affected. (At least according to one of my local MSMs.)

Seems insane to me that one company’s messed up update could cause so much global disruption and so many systems gone down :/ This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.

  • aard@kyu.de
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    4 months ago

    The annoying aspect from somebody with decades of IT experience is - what should happen is that crowdstrike gets sued into oblivion, and people responsible for buying that shit should have an epihpany and properly look at how they are doing their infra.

    But will happen is that they’ll just buy a new crwodstrike product that promises to mitigate the fallout of them fucking up again.

    • 0x0@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      decades of IT experience

      Do any changes - especially upgrades - on local test environments before applying them in production?

      The scary bit is what most in the industry already know: critical systems are held on with duct tape and maintained by juniors 'cos they’re the cheapest Big Money can find. And even if not, There’s no time. or It’s too expensive. are probably the most common answers a PowerPoint manager will give to a serious technical issue being raised.

      The Earth will keep turning.

      • HumanPenguin@feddit.uk
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        4 months ago

        Not OP. But that is how it used to be done. Issue is the attacks we have seen over the years. IE ransom attacks etc. Have made corps feel they needf to fixed and update instantly to avoid attacks. So they depend on the corp they pay for the software to test roll out.

        Autoupdate is a 2 edged sword. Without it, attackers etc will take advantage of delays. With it. Well today.

        • 0x0@programming.dev
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          4 months ago

          I’d wager most ransomware relies on old vulnerabilities. Yes, keep your software updated but you don’t need the latest and greatest delivered right to production without any kind of test first.

          • HumanPenguin@feddit.uk
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            4 months ago

            Very much so. But the vulnerabilities do not tend to be discovered (by developers) until an attack happens. And auto updates are generally how the spread of attacks are limited.

            Open source can help slightly. Due to both good and bad actors unrelated to development seeing the code. So it is more common for alerts to hit before attacks. But far from a fix all.

            But generally, time between discovery and fix is a worry for big corps. So why auto updates have been accepted with less manual intervention than was common in the past.

        • Avatar_of_Self@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I get the sentiment but defense in depth is a methodology to live by in IT and auto updating via the Internet is not a good risk to take in general. For example, should Crowdstrike just disappear one day, your entire infrastructure shouldn’t be at enormous risk nor should critical services. Even if it’s your anti-virus, a virus or ransomware shouldn’t be able to easily propagate through the enterprise. If it did, then it is doubtful something like Crowdstrike is going to be able to update and suddenly reverse course. If it can then you’re just lucky that the ransomware that made it through didn’t do anything in defense of itself (disconnecting from the network, blocking CIDRs like Crowdsource’s update servers, blocking processes, whatever) and frankly you can still update those clients anyway from your own AV update server which is a product you’d be using if you aren’t allowing updates from the Internet in order to roll them out in dev first, phasing and/or schedules from your own infrastructure.

          Crowdstrike is just another lesson in that.

  • SitD@lemy.lol
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    4 months ago

    I love how everyone understands the issue wrong. It’s not about being on Windows or Linux. It’s about the ecosystem that is common place and people are used to on Windows or Linux. On windows it’s accepted that every stupid anticheat can drop its filthy paws into ring 0 and normies don’t mind. Linux has a fostered a less clueless community, but ultimately it’s a reminder to keep vigilant and strive for pure and well documented open source with the correct permissions.

    BSODs won’t come from userspace software

      • SitD@lemy.lol
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        4 months ago

        That’s precisely why I didn’t blame windows in my post, but the windows-consumer mentality of “yeah install with privileges, shove genshin impact into ring 0 why not”

        Linux can have the same issue. We have to keep the culture on our side here vigilant and pure near the kernel.

  • bricklove@midwest.social
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    4 months ago

    I wanted to share the article with friends and copy a part of the text I wanted to draw attention to but the asshole site has selection disabled. Now I will not do that and timesnownews can go fuck themselves

    • magic_lobster_party@kbin.run
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      4 months ago

      Not really. This isn’t a Windows problem. This is a faulty software problem. People can write faulty software on Linux too.

    • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      You’d think maybe not being reliant on a 90 billion dollar company to un-fuck security would be a bigger deal than it is.

    • aasatru@kbin.earth
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      4 months ago

      I guess they would want some cybersecurity software like Crowdstrike in either case? If so, this could probably have happened on any system, as it’s a bug in third party software that crashes the computer.

      Not that I know much about this, but if this leads to a push towards Linux it would be if companies already wanted to make the switch, but were unwilling because they thought they needed Crowdstrike specifically. This might lead them to consider alternative cybersecurity software.

  • SeattleRain@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    It’s proving that POSIX architecture is necessary even if it requires additional computer literacy on the part of users and admins.

    The risk of hacking (which is what Crowdstrike essentially does to get so deeply embedded and be so effective at endpoint protection) a monolithic system like Windows OS is if you screw up the whole thing comes tumbling down.

  • fireshell@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    Microsoft should test all its products on its own computers, not on ours. Made an update, tested it and only then posted it online.

  • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Is there an easy way to silence every fuckdamn sanctimonious linux cultist from my lemmy experience?

    Secondly, this update fucked linux just as bad as windows, but keep huffing your own farts. You seem to like it.

    • Morphit @feddit.uk
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      4 months ago

      I’d unsubscribe from !linux@lemmy.ml for a start.

      I’m pretty sure this update didn’t get pushed to linux endpoints, but sure, linux machines running the CrowdStrike driver are probably vulnerable to panicking on malformed config files. There are a lot of weirdos claiming this is a uniquely Windows issue.

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Thanks for the tip, so glad Lemmy makes it easy to block communities.

        Also: It seems everyone is claiming it didn’t affect Linux but as part of our corporate cleanup yesterday, I had 8 linux boxes I needed to drive to the office to throw a head on and reset their iDrac so sure maybe they all just happened to fail at the same time but in my 2 years on this site we’ve never had more than 1 down at a time ever, and never for the same reason. I’m not the tech head of the site by any means and it certainly could be unrelated, but people with significantly greater experience than me in my org chalked this up to Crowdstrike.