Meanwhile a Microsoft employee on how to prevent such an issue under Linux: https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-Auto-Boot-Assessment
I don’t know enough about Windows 10/11, but aren’t they supposed to boot into a menu thet allows you to pick the last known good configuration before it evens boots to the gui?
It’s been a while since I had such a massive problem under Windows but the last time you could try to restore one of the last backups and usually that failed because Windows restore points are/were crap.
Apparently it’s because CrowdStrike installed their device driver as one that must start when Windows starts.
Explained here: https://youtu.be/wAzEJxOo1ts?feature=shared&t=675
I’ve linked to the specific time where he explains that issue, but tbh the whole video is worth watching.
a Microsoft employee
You’re talking about good ol’ Lenny like he isn’t the author of the most used init and utility system as well as PulseAudio.
I know who that is and he’s also a Microsoft employee these days which makes this a funny sequence of statements:
“EU bad because they made us open up Windows to 3rd party anti-virus vendors. Oh, btw, the fully open Linux operating system can cope with such a problem if properly configured. Here’s the documentation to make that configuration.”
Oh FFS. I love this era where companies will not accept the blame due to “liability”, even when they are explicitly to blame.
We all hate Microsoft for turning Windows into an ad platform but they aren’t wrong.
They are legally required to give Crowdstrike or anyone complete low level access to the OS. They are legally required to let Crowdstrike crash your computer. Because anything else means Microsoft is in control and not the software you installed.
It’s no different than Linux in that way. If you install a buggy device driver on Linux, that’s your/the driver’s fault, not Linux.
You are not wrong, but people don’t want to hear it. Do we want to retain control over what goes into kernel space or not? If so, we have to accept that whatever we stuff in there can crash the entire thing. That’s why we have stuff like driver signatures. Which Crowdstrike apparently bypassed with a technical loophole from how I understand it.
I actually agree, I own my computer / OS and I should be able to do what you’re saying (install and break things). But Microsoft is a trillion dollar multi national corporation and I am certainly going to give them grief about this because I owe them less than nothing, let alone any good will.
The thing is, Microsoft’s virus-scanning API shouldn’t be able to BSOD anything, no matter what third-party software makes calls to it, or the nature of those calls. They should have implemented some kind of error handler for when the calls are malformed.
So this is really a case of both Crowdstrike and Microsoft fucking up. Crowdstrike shoulders most of the blame, of course, but Microsoft really needs to harden their API to appropriately catch errors, or this will happen again.
I’m an idiot. For some reason, I was thinking about the Windows Defender API, which can be called from third-party applications.
I don’t believe there was any specific API in use here, for virus scanning or not. I suppose maybe the device driver API? I am not a kernel developer so I don’t know if that’s the right term for it.
Crowdstrike’s driver was loaded at boot and caused a null pointer dereference error, inside the kernel. In userspace, when this happens, the kernel is there to catch it so only the application that caused it crashes. In kernelspace, you get a BSOD because there’s really nothing else to do.
They are legally required to let Crowdstrike crash your computer.
I call Bullshit.
If it had been Windows NT 3.5, there would have been no bluescreens around the world. It would have stopped the buggy software, given a message accordingly, and continued it’s job. That Windows was not stupid enough to crash itself just because of a null pointer in another software.
Now you tell me that Windows NT 3.5 is illegal?
You could absolutely install software on Windows 3.5 that would crash the system.
I ran 3.5. Yes, a network driver crash would blue screen NT3.5. Graphics were in user space in 3.5 so a video driver couldn’t take NT 3.5 down but networking was in the kernel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel
We all hate Microsoft for turning Windows into an ad platform but they aren’t wrong.
Sorry, how is that related to the stability of the kernel?
I explained in my second sentence.
“They are legally required to give Crowdstrike or anyone low level access to the OS.”
If you install a buggy driver into Linux and it crashes, that’s not a problem with the Linux kernel.
https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/linux-kernel-panic
Yeah I saw the article that says they’re legally required but until I can actually read that document where it says “thou shall give everyone ring-0” access I’m gonna call it bullshit.
If it’s not ring 0, it’s not full access. They are legally required to give full access.
But what if Windows have something similar to eBPF in Linux, and CS opted to use it, will this disaster won’t happen at all or in a much smaller scale and less impactful?
Crowdstrike managed to fuck up Linux through eBPF just as well.
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7068083
If you load hacky shit into the kernel it can always find a way to make a nasty surprise. eBPF is a little bit better fence, not some miracle that automatically fixes shitty code.
Fuck Microsoft and fuck Windows.
But if you inject hacky bullshit third party code into someone’s OS that breaks things, it’s not the OS’s fault.
But in this case Microsoft certified the driver. If they knew the driver included an interpreter that can run arbitrary code, they shouldn’t have certified it because they can not fully test it. If they didn’t know, then their certification test are inadequate. Most of the blame lies with the security software. If Microsoft didn’t certify it, they would have had zero fault.
Certifying a driver is not an endorsement.
It is a verification that it is legitimately from who it claims to be from. Microsoft has zero fault, period.
even when it was the bears I knew it was regulation and taxes.
This whole thing just exposes that people getting paid big bucks for this shit, aint really that smart or planning for anything, they are just collecting rent until something blows up lol
They just pay so when it goes sideways they can hold up their hands and point out a reputable supplier was used and now it’s not their problem or blemish on their career.
Yes, an anarchist guy pointed this out to me that in our world responsibility can be delegated via contract while this doesn’t make any sense. The responsible person should still be responsible, only the specific action would be choosing those to whom to delegate the obligation for which they are responsible.
Like in Nazi Germany and other fascist states they like to emotionally make only the leaders responsible, while with corps they like to only make the last company in chain responsible.
In fact all chain is responsible. Responsibility is fully contagious.
If this was like this in all laws, we’d have a much better world.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the people finding viruses/malwares and detecting them aren’t the same people responsible for deployment. And anyway, it’s not like smart people make zero mistakes…
Is this even relevant? Wasn’t it a kernel driver module?
It’s a third party kernel module, which Microsoft would love to be able to block, but legally can’t. It’s technically possible to write a virus scanner that runs in user space instead of the kernel, but it’s easier to make sure everything gets scanned if it’s in the kernel.
