CrowdStroke
On Friday, as we were running around the hospital where we work trying to get every computer working again, we were following the work-around to rename the Crowdstrike folder under C:\Windows\system32\drivers to “bad-CrowdStrike”.
When my coworker was typing the rename command, instead of typing “cro TAB”, he started typing “clo TAB”. He’d ask me why it wasn’t finding it, and I’d point out the typo.
I started saying, it’s not “CloudStrike”, it’s “CrowdStrike”.
By the end of the day, we were both a little loopy. I started typing “CloudStrike”, and cursing him out for screwing with my head. By the end of the day I wasn’t sure what it was either.
CloudStrike
CrownStrike
ClownStrike
It occurred to us that CrowdStrike is an absolutely terrible name. It sounds like a terrorist attack. Of course, it felt like one on Friday.
It occurred to us that CrowdStrike is an absolutely terrible name. It sounds like a terrorist attack. Of course, it felt like one on Friday.
When I first heard about what was going on, I assumed that “CrowdStrike” was not the name of the software/company, but rather some sort of advanced DDOS-like attack where they used systems they’d previously hacked and had them all do the same thing at once to another target.
ClownStrike
A fitting rename after such a pathetic and catastrophic failure, that’s for sure.
funny thing is I, and probably most people, had never even heard that there was something called “CrowdStrike” until Friday of last week
Same for me with Solar Winds, Equifax, SVB and Ashley Madison.
Weird to think that some kind of major catastrophe in the future could again be caused by some company that exists right now, but am unaware of.
Are you not in the US? Equifax is a credit bureau and if you’ve never heard of them, you never needed credit or you’re not from the US.
The other three, I’ve only heard of Ashley Madison because they had a very aggressive ad campaign before ad blockers became ubiquitous. One could say it was ads like theirs that made ad blocking a requirement.
I’m a Formula One fan. The Mercedes team are sponsored by them. You see their logo every time you see an on board shot of the cars.
I had no idea until this weekend.
End of season, at least, or whenever the livery/sponsorship contract runs out. Mercedes isn’t liable to care too much - it’s just a livery.
an operating system that allows third-party ring 0 access
Linux with eBPF:
So why is this considered a crowdstrike issue and not a Microsoft fuckup?
Doesn’t Microsoft allow crowdstrike to make updates? Being such a critical part of the OS it’s up to Microsoft to ensure their procedures are robust and being followed.
How do you implement that? How is it feasible that Microsoft tests all the third party drivers?
Don’t get me wrong I believe Microsoft is partly to blame for this problem as well but for making it so hard for system admins to go around the system and solve things (as compared to Linux where you can do anything). I think sys admins would have solved this much faster if they were using Linux systems
I was just probing your argument because I guessed it was the typical nonsense of Microsoft bad, Linux good, without a good explanation
Same thing would happen on Linux if someone wrote a bad kernel module and integrated it into the OS. In fact, Crowdstrike did have a similar problem a few months ago on Linux.
I’m no fan of Microsoft, but this isn’t their fault.
An OS should not have to require a 3rd party driver for security.
Microsoft should be writing that driver as an OS component. Drivers should be restricted for taking to hardware.
I thought only people who subscribed to CrowdStrike’s services had that driver installed.
Windows: exists
Crowdstrike: stabs
You: why would Microsoft stab themselves?
To be fair, kernel level access by third party software is kind of frowned upon in the Linux world. Ask any desktop Linux user how they feel about NVIDIA (the only third party kernel code an average Linux user will install) and their drivers randomly causing strange issues on their systems up to and including kernel panics compared to the experience on AMD where the driver is open and built into the kernel itself. For security software that needs low level visibility, there is eBPF, direct kernel level access isn’t needed (though I believe CrowdStrike uses it, and thay actually did CrowdStrike Debian and Rocky Linux systems some time back).
MacOS blocked the majority of kernel extensions a few years ago as well.
Windows is the only OS where it has been designed in a way where kernel level access is the rule rather than the exception. So design flaws are at least partially at fault here.
The opinion of Linux desktop users (or any users really) do not count in the enterprise world. Somehow, if management bought in on the Crowdstrike rootkit bandwagon, you’ll see it on corporate hardware. It doesn’t matter if it’s a bad plan; it doesn’t matter if it gives an American company a backdoor to all you infrastructure; if the CISO decides everyone gets it, everyone get it.
The only thing you can really do as a lowly employee is keep any such device away from any personal info or network as if it’s infected by malware (which I would argue is exactly what it is).
Windows: exists
Crowdstrike: exists
Windows: open belly, right here!
Crowdstrike: stabs
Crowdstrike released bad code into prod without giving it some hours of testing in local machines or whatever. Incredible fuckup, inimaginable. But, let’s not take blame out of Microsoft, if a driver is faulty the system should be resilient enough no to crap the bed on login. At least enough for IT to be able to remotely access the system and fix it. The manual work the IT world has had to do because it’s lost remote access to workstations is insane.
Basically, crowdstrike wrote bad code that run as a driver, windows doesn’t like bad code in their drivers. Kernel level code is generally expected to run properly. crowdstrike’s kernel level code was really bad. Embarrassingly bad.
If the host creates a playlist and everyone can add their favorite song to the playlist, the host won’t be blamed if you add “erika”. People rightfully think you are an ignorant weirdo or a bad person, not the host.
OTOH, if you build a playlist manager for playlists everyone can add to, you make sure nothing anyone adds will break it…
Well do you want to have Microsoft approving EVERY driver for windows? Rip 3rd party open source drivers for retro hardware
