IT Department's Plan

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.

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.

other companies could have shipped a lot worse.

other companies governments could have shipped a lot worse.

FTFY

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.

Centralize control in house.

For a company this big it would also have to have gotten past a code review and QA team, right? ... right? ...

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.

This is an industry wide issue. This is just the first symptom.

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.

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.

Username kinda ckecks out

Cloudstriked

They striked all right

Defending Windows in a linux memes community.

That's a bold move cotton, let's see how that works out for 'em

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.

Few things, in rough order:

• Smaller = less attack surface. You can strip a Linux OS down to only what is needed.

• 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.

• Open source transparency forces corporates to be better. We can see what they are and aren't doing.

• 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.

• Unix security is simplier than Windows security, so easer to not mess up.

In general it is. Opensource software has less bugs that proprietary. And even those bugs can be mitigated with hardening.

Sort of an aside, but I am seeing Microsoft more as a hostile entity that I need to protect myself from.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is nothing Microsoft I would consider "top tier" when it comes to security.

Defender does a great job for many AV tasks. Crowdstrike does more, and protection isn't tied to windows updates.

This isn't a situation where companies just chose not to use the free item, the free item has other costs (management overhead) and is missing some features.

The best answer, of course, is to not use windows for anything that needs to be secure.

Edit: For those who think I'm wrong, cool. I'm not but you are welcome to disagree.

There is a difference between the free defender and paid for defender. If you're a home user, check out defenderui.com to get (many, not all) features that are normally limited to intune/gpo.

A full and proper deployed defender stack is very good, but in terms of management.... The approach to different os's is practically cobbled together, the webui is horrific, and it lacks some basic functionality. A problem to manage a system like this is a problem to deploy a system like this.

If you're on the free Defender level, you are not getting anywhere near the same features as falcon, there is absolutely zero question about that.

Do you use CrowdStrike on your PC? If not, you have nothing to worry about