e. hashman 🇵🇸Jul 19, 2024
Fun fact: when I worked in security I used to install and maintain Crowdstrike agents (among other security vendor products) on customer machines. It's not Windows-only, they also have a Linux client. Which runs as a kernel module and requires auditd.
Show threade. hashman 🇵🇸Jul 19, 2024

They also have a mac client, though it looks like neither Linux nor Apple machines were affected by the bad update.

I'd view that as pure dumb luck until I actually see an RCA. Because of the way their agents work, any system could be utterly borked.

Show threade. hashman 🇵🇸Jul 19, 2024
I would have thought at Crowdstrike's scale that SURELY they use a slow-rollout/canary model for global updates. But the scale of this outage suggests otherwise. There's no way the rollout should have continued with 100% of clients not checking in.
Show threade. hashman 🇵🇸Jul 19, 2024
I'm rolling my eyes at the people going off about "don't deploy on Fridays". This went out Thursday night. No matter what day of the week it went out, it's going to take more than a work week to fix and everyone's weekend would be toast. Sometimes you just ship real stinkers, lol
Show threade. hashman 🇵🇸Jul 20, 2024
Everyone loves to confidently proclaim that companies shouldn't do X or Y (don't use rootkits for security! audit checkboxes are useless!) but it's funny how there's always dead silence when you ask what companies who really don't have security as a core competency should do instead
Show threade. hashman 🇵🇸Jul 20, 2024

Genuinely trying to understand here why Starbucks should be investing in building a world-class computer security organization instead of just paying for the best option vendor product

Hard for me to see this as anything but self-serving for people in the security industry, lol

Show threadIrenes (many)Jul 20, 2024

@ehashman yeah there really is no realistic option

but please note that, like, these multinationals have the market power to insist that somebody make a realistic option for them, if they cared to

Show threadIrenes (many)Jul 20, 2024
@ehashman like, we agree that it's unrealistic for every company to specialize in information security, but these are not exactly struggling mom-and-pop shops
Show threade. hashman 🇵🇸Jul 20, 2024
@ireneista the ones hitting the news, not so much, but when I was installing security vendor agents for a living, the vast number of our customers numerically were very tech illiterate smaller businesses
Show threadIrenes (many)Jul 20, 2024
@ehashman yes, certainly. we want to be clear, it's our position that the product does very little that anyone should want in the first place. it's the (pardon the jargon) hyper-real simulacrum of security, not the real thing.
Show threade. hashman 🇵🇸Jul 20, 2024
@ireneista I think it's fine to argue that these products are overkill/expensive/poorly engineered/excessive for security monitoring but I think that's a different argument than saying these do nothing at all. Because the alternative in my experience is unmonitored boxes getting popped without detection, and most shops don't want to or know how to roll their own security monitoring. Maybe in the best case one of their infra providers will let them know about it
Show threadIrenes (many)

@ehashman yes, fine, reactive monitoring for existing threats is better than nothing. that is fair.

we would never argue that this stuff is OVERKILL. we don't think a real solution would end up looking anything like it, really, but our belief is definitely that the tools do not do enough, not that they do too much

Jul 20, 2024 at 2:51amWeb
Show threade. hashman 🇵🇸Jul 20, 2024
@ireneista I feel a little silly because I'm not trying to argue that Crowdstrike's product is good or anything, just that there are genuinely good reasons that people pay for it, even if a better solution probably exists out there :)
Show threadIrenes (many)Jul 20, 2024
@ehashman well, for what it's worth the discussion helped us understand our own position better. it's not that we think there's a better solution out there - there isn't. it's that we think the entire topic is drastically under-funded, and what funding does exist goes mostly to rent-seeking products with minimal utility, rather than to making real progress
Show threadIrenes (many)Jul 20, 2024
@ehashman if you're silly but it helps yourself or others to express themselves better, it wasn't silly, in our view. or at least not silly in a bad way