this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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This isn't a gloat post. In fact, I was completely oblivious to this massive outage until I tried to check my bank balance and it wouldn't log in.

Apparently Visa Paywave, banks, some TV networks, EFTPOS, etc. have gone down. Flights have had to be cancelled as some airlines systems have also gone down. Gas stations and public transport systems inoperable. As well as numerous Windows systems and Microsoft services affected. (At least according to one of my local MSMs.)

Seems insane to me that one company's messed up update could cause so much global disruption and so many systems gone down :/ This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago

US and UK flights are grounded because of the issue, banks, media and some businesses not fully functioning. Likely we'll see more effects as the day goes on.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (3 children)

after reading all the comments I still have no idea what the hell crowdstrike is

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago

Company offering new-age antivirus solutions, which is to say that instead of being mostly signature-based, it tries to look at application behavior instead. If Word was exploited because some user opened not_a_virus_please_open.docx from their spam folder, Word might be exploited and end up running some malware that tries to encrypt the entire drive. It's supposed to sniff out that 1. Word normally opens and saves like one document at a time and 2. some unknown program is being overly active. And so it should stop that and ring some very loud alarm bells at the IT department.

Basically they doubled down on the heuristics-based detection and by that, they claim to be able to recognize and stop all kinds of new malware that they haven't seen yet. My experience is that they're always the outlier on the top-end of false positives in business AV tests (eg AV-Comparatives Q2 2024) and their advantage has mostly disappeared since every AV has implemented that kind of behavior-based detection nowadays.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

AV, EDP they offer other solutions as well. I think their main selling point is tamper-proof protection as well.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

We're all going to be so smug.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Same here. I was totally busy writing software in a new language and a new framework, and had a gazillion tabs on Google and stackexchange open. I didn't notice any network issues until I was on my way home, and the windows f-up was the one big thing in the radio news. Looks like Windows admins will have a busy weekend.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

Only if they manage Crowdstrike systems, thankfully.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.

Its true, but otherside of same coin is that with too much solo implementation you lose benefits of economy of scale.

But indeed the world seems like a village today.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Me too. Additionally, I use guix so if a system update ever broke my machine I can just rollback to a prior system version (either via the command line or grub menu).

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Is there a chance that this makes organisations move to Linux?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Not really. This isn’t a Windows problem. This is a faulty software problem. People can write faulty software on Linux too.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

I guess they would want some cybersecurity software like Crowdstrike in either case? If so, this could probably have happened on any system, as it's a bug in third party software that crashes the computer.

Not that I know much about this, but if this leads to a push towards Linux it would be if companies already wanted to make the switch, but were unwilling because they thought they needed Crowdstrike specifically. This might lead them to consider alternative cybersecurity software.

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