askchapo

Managers all over the world gave snakeoil salesmen Crowdstrike deep deep access to their Windows computers, so they can "protect" them from hackers. These managers are either stupid and/or covering their asses, so in case they get hacked, they can say "See I bought this Crowdstrike crap, like everybody else, so I did my best!".

Well Crowdstrike just shit the bed and pushed an update on all the computers and they are just in a crash-reboot-crash-reboot loop, and you manually need to sit in front of the computer to fix that. This is probably the most computers anyone has ever crashed.

if your workplace had crowdstrike installed on your computer to make sure you're not [Redacted] unauthorized non-work activity on your work issued laptop, then you might have had to restart up to 15 times to not get a blue screen of death.

also some flights were canceled or something IDK

Popular cybersecurity program fuck up real bad. Hundreds of thousands of computers broke.

Crowd strike is an antivirus/corporate security platform that had a bad update that will brick your computer until you delete a file. Almost every corporate Windows machine is fucked right now and it's a good day to be a developer on a Mac and not an IT person.

Clownstrike

Crowd Strike is the latest weapons system development by the IDF

I just thought of a metaphor for this stuff.

Imagine you have some secure compound, like a military base. It has good thick walls and fences all around, and also internally between areas, and there are checkpoints where guards check everyone's credentials, and only allow people into areas where they have any business being. This would be good security.

Unfortunately, Windows and lots of other software is not like that, since it was developed before the internet, when you actually needed physical access to mess with a computer. So most company's networks and computers are more like a university campus where people can just wander around as they please. So you could try to rebuild and retrofit everything to be more like the above mentioned military base, but that is hard, expensive and very disruptive.

So here comes Crowdstrike, with their sales pitch: We'll send a couple of security guards over, and they will look out for anyone suspicious and if they see something, they sound an alarm and maybe detain the person. Of course they need access to everything in order to do their job. You need to trust them to not fuck up and cause some damage or even to not hire infiltrators which would have full security clearance.

Well in this case, they got a faulty order from Crowdstrike to shut the whole thing down, not let anyone in, and no communication in and out. So now someone with some actual authority has to go down there, and tell them to stand down. And this happened probably to some double-digit percentage of bigger companies and institutions everywhere except in China, all at the same time.

Butlerian Jihad is here