Some executive thought it would be cheaper to outsource.
At my former company, whatever cheap and dirty solution that was available regardless of risk or even long term cost was the preferred solution.
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CrowdStrike Says Global IT Outage Impacting Windows PCs, But Mac and Linux Hosts Not Affected
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At my former company, whatever cheap and dirty solution that was available regardless of risk or even long term cost was the preferred solution.
This is basically WannaCry 2.0, except instead of crypto thieves demanding ransom in Bitcoin a security company messes up an update and everything goes south.
Immutable is a strong word for any system not air-gapped from the Internet. However it's situations like this why I don't have every software package on auto-update. Not everything needs to be updated everywhere all at once.
It also should highlight for people the risk of the IT monoculture.
Finally the risk of these SIP-T2/TPM/etc designs. At some point we're going to see a corrupted automated update/worm/hack/etc that bricks a whole bunch of computers in a way that is unfixable.
Your company is smart enough to not use CrowdStrike.
Thank you! I was wondering what the “But” and Negation were for too. Haha.
Here's the reality of this situation in IT over the past 25+ years: A 3rd party app crashes Windows (or Mac) and the user (whether it's an end user or IT Admin) can't boot. Someone (the IT department Reps) need to physically go to EACH machine and fix the problem so the machine can boot. That takes a massive amount of time and can only be done after the fix is found AND the IT Rep is properly comfortable with performing the steps for the fix.
Now flash forward to the past 10 or so years where so many employees are remote. Their machine can't boot. How is IT going to contact them?...the company better pray that IT has every employee's phone number to a)tell them about the problem and b)later get back to them about the fix. And then when the fix is ready, IT now needs to call each employee and pray they can walk the employee through the fix over the phone. There is the stark reality that over-the-phone cannot be done and now the employee needs to drive 100+ miles to an office or Fedex the machine...either way, days of productivity are lost as well as revenue.
I've worked at several large and small companies and getting ahold of their IT departments on the phone is next to impossible and that's when my machine was working and I had access to the corporate intranet to find the IT phone number. I recall a time when Bitlocker had wacky issues and I couldn't boot and had to call my boss who had to contact IT. What percentage of corporate employees have their boss' phone number?! Very small percentage I would gather.
Mac people here ridiculing Windows apparently don't realize it's not a Windows problem, it's a Crowdstrike problem.
The fact that Mac computers aren't affected is by the grace of Crowdstrike, not Apple.
Go on now! Off your high-horse.
The fact that Mac computers aren't affected is by the grace of Crowdstrike, not Apple.
Go on now! Off your high-horse.
I'm not really sure how any of this supports the point you're trying to make. Companies hosting and controlling their own IT systems locally also use Crowdstrike and have been just as heavily affected by this. I'd argue that it's often the cloud providers who are more resilient to things like this and when things do go wrong have the resources, expertise and clout to get their client's hosted systems up and running again far quicker than your average small company IT dept.
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Not pointless; sure identification has happened, you still need to contain, eradicate, recover. And communicate. Can't just sit back and do nothing. Even in this event there are still plenty of measures that can be taken.
Actually it would be harder to break macOS like that, because Apple phased out kernel extension, so Crowdstrike run in the kernel like on Windows.
Another reason I carry cash on me. I've been through a couple of disasters in NYC that have made electronic payment systems go down very quickly.
Don't gloat too much, people. We all know how many tentacles Cupertino has into our/its devices/platforms and it's always possible a similiar situation, whether intentional or accidental, could happen to us next time. The software supply chain is a major vulnerability regardless of platform.
Just carry on and hope for the best!
Just carry on and hope for the best!
It was a worldwide problem and they do have 24.000 customers. It operates in the background so only your sysadmin knows it's there and the customers are of course large corporations and governments/institutions.
So damn loozer is this company. Already -11% Stock but well deserved.
As a software tester I am really surprised how they managed to screw this that much.
Once I was responsible for testing test bench software and we were testing on 15 machines with 5 different versions of Windows LTS with latest and previous patches and this was also part of testing - smoke just after installing Windows and that application, if PC starts and restarts properly within expected times and not crash at loading different projects to this app.
Same went with updates of app on the same different versions. Lots of work but saved our ass few times.
But yeah, look how AI will kick me out of work 🤣
As a software tester I am really surprised how they managed to screw this that much.
Once I was responsible for testing test bench software and we were testing on 15 machines with 5 different versions of Windows LTS with latest and previous patches and this was also part of testing - smoke just after installing Windows and that application, if PC starts and restarts properly within expected times and not crash at loading different projects to this app.
Same went with updates of app on the same different versions. Lots of work but saved our ass few times.
But yeah, look how AI will kick me out of work 🤣
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You make it sound like this is just delayed revenue while the e-commerce front page is down.
Almost any organization today has (Windows) computers intergated into their workflow and operations. Hopefully no plane's onboard computers run Windows but there's still ATC, ticketing systems, baggage handling systems, security checkpoints, ... Similarly for hospitals and various other organizations responsible for people's lives at any givem moment.
And as a company you still have to take care of them. That means rerouting planes around "bricked" airports (but to where if your computers can't get the status of alternate airports?). It's meant canceling non-emergency surgeries and pausing patient visits because doctors can't access patient medical records. But which surgeries to cancel? Get the patient list from the ...oh...just call the patients and ...just get their number from the...oh
Unfortuantely we haven't designed our critical infrastructure/systems (in the broadest sense of the word systems) with resiliency in mind.
The IT leadership who went with a multicloud solution gets it:
“Unprecedented” Google Cloud event wipes out customer account and its backups
UniSuper, a $135 billion pension account, details its cloud compute nightmare.
arstechnica.com
Because even a POS connects to a central server, and so would need to have critical security updates. Aside from this, you would probably understand that this was not an automatic Windows update that caused this issue if you had simply read the article or even a few of the comments here.
Yea the heat Microsoft is taking from everything I'm reading is unfair. It appears to be solely how Crowdstrike was configured unless I missed something.
IMO yes & no...
I assume MS works very heavily with Crowdstrike to make sure that OS updates etc do not break their software (for example) Kind of like Jamf works heavily with Apple with every new OS release etc
There was some chatter among some sys admins on X in the wee hours of this AM, that MS should have a way for Windows to have a fallback option when something like this happens given very few (if any) other software have pretty much root level access to the windows OS itself