I’m seeing some real time, grade-A consent manufacturing regarding this massive crowdstrike outage. Every article I see blames Microsoft. I have no love for Microsoft, but they were not to blame. The people who are too blame are crowdstrike, the software company who deployed the broken update that caused the outage.

* Puts on immaculately thought out tinfoil hat *

Crowdstrike is more a piece of US surveillance tech than it is an actual security suite. In essence it can take any data from a device it is installed on and can execute any command on those devices (due to the way the software very tightly integrated with the windows operating system, bypassing security on the OS). A powerful tool when you consider that the US government can subpoena any us corporation to hand over the information they hold.

Now, crowdstrike had a huge market share, but you can bet that after this event people are going to be less willing to use it, and this will result in the US losing a huge part of its surveillance network. People don’t care what security suite they use, so long as it works, so people are going to switch.

Cue the absolute deluge of articles I’ve been seeing blaming this on Microsoft. An operating system so ingrained into the business world that no-one is going to switch to an alternative, no matter how much they fuck up. They can take the heat and mitigate the damage to crowdstrike. Thus preserving the US state surveillance appetatus.

* Tin foil hat removed and placed back into its extremely well thought out box *

What do people think?

  • peto (he/him)
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    4 months ago

    I’d say MS gets a small cut of the blame for signing a driver that didn’t properly validate it’s input, allowing this to happen, but yeah you are right, the problem definitely sits in crowdstrike and it’s status as a premium rootkit. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you run MS, Apple or Linux. If you install someone’s kernel level backdoor, they own your machine.

    Unfortunately I expect anything these businesses move to be state-vulnerable just the same. Some might go down the open source + in house team route but that is seen as an expensive and wasteful route by capitalists.