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CrowdStrike unhappy with “shady commentary” from competitors after outage (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Microsoft gave CrowdStrike unfettered access to push an update that can BSOD every Windows machine without a bypass or failsafe in place. That turned out to be a bad idea.

CrowdStrike pushed an errant update. Microsoft allowed a single errant update to cause an unrecoverable boot loop. CrowdStrike is the market leader in their sector and brings in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, but Microsoft is older than the internet and creates hundreds of billions of dollars. CrowdStrike was the primary cause, but Microsoft enabled the meltdown.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Microsoft did not "give Crowdstrike access to push updates". The IT departments of the companies did.

The security features that Crowdstrike has forces them to run in kernel-space, which means that they will have code running that can crash the OS. They crashed Debian in an almost identical way (forced boot loop) about a month before they did the same to Windows.

Yes, there are ways that Microsoft could rewrite the Windows kernel architecture to make it resistant to this type of failure. But I don't think there are very many other commercial OS's that could stop this from happening.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

You're absolutely right, here is an in-depth explanation from Dave Plummer, the guy who wrote the task manager: https://youtu.be/ZHrayP-Y71Q

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Microsoft gave CrowdStrike unfettered access to push an update that can BSOD every Windows machine without a bypass or failsafe in place. That turned out to be a bad idea.

They have to give that access by EU ruling:

Microsoft software licensing expert Rich Gibbons said: “Microsoft has received some criticism for the fact that a third party was able to affect Windows at such a deep technical level. It’s interesting that Microsoft has pointed out the fact this stems from a 2009 EU anti-competition ruling that means Microsoft must give other security companies the same access to the Windows kernel as they have themselves.”