The real blame lies on the fact that Windows lets hundreds of companies like Crowdstrike ship kernel-level software to millions of computers. The fact that this incident was caused by an accidental bug is hilarious, but we’re lucky that it wasn’t someone pushing malicious software instead.
Windows drivers are a huge liability and I wouldn’t be surprised if the next time is a state actor like Russia pushing kernel-level malware.
I hate how many video games come with kernel level anti cheat, it’s an attractive target for hacks
The helldivers community fucking hates me for pointing this out. Don’t buy helldivers, or any other game packaged with such bullshit.
The real fuck up is that Crowdstrike Falcon can auto update through its own updater, and doesn’t have any kind of control panel for management that could be used for change control. If their customers could have tested this update first, none of this would be happening.
Or if they were smart enough to do a phased rollout to a small percentage of users before deploying worldwide. That catches most issues quickly.
Let’s be real, Microsoft wouldn’t do a hell of a lot better even if they had that stuff locked down. Their fuckups just tend to hit the general public a little more frequently than enterprise customers.
Edit: I wrote this before I learned about yesterday’s Azure outage lol. That definitely adds to my point.
so you’re saying you shouldn’t be able to install any software with drivers? there’s nothing microsoft can do about mass installing a program with elevated privileges, especially if it had actual uses like this