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> What would you do instead?

As said, limit the user's abilities as much as possible with features of the OS and software in use. Maybe if you want those other metrics, use a firewall, but not a Tls-breaking virus scanning abomination that has all the same problems, but a simple one that can warn you on unusual traffic patterns. If soneone from accounting starts uploading a lot of data, connects to Google cloud when you don't use any of their products, that should be odd.

If we're talking about organized crime, I'm not convinced crowdstrike in particular doesn't actually enlarge the attack surface. So we had what now as the cause, a malformed binary ruleset that the parser, running with kernel privileges, choked on and crashed the system. Because of course the parsing needs to happen in kernel space and not a sandboxed process. That's enough for me to make assumptions about the quality of the rest of the software, and answer the question regarding attack surface.

Before this incident nobody ever really looked at this product at all from a security standpoint, maybe because it is (supposed to be) a security product and thus cannot have any flaws. But it seems now security researchers all over the planet start looking at this thing and are having a field day.

Bill gates sent that infamous email in the early 2000s, I think after sasser hit the world, that security should be made the no1 priority for Windows. As much as I dislike windows for various reasons, I think overall Microsoft does a rather good job about this. Maybe it's time those companies behind these security products start taking security serious too?




> Before this incident nobody ever really looked at this product at all from a security standpoint

If you only knew how absurd of a statement that is. But in any case, there are just too many threats network IDS/IPS solutions won't help you with, any decent C2 will make it trivial to circumvent them. You can't limit the permissions of your employees to the point of being effective against such attacks while still being able to do their job.


> If you only knew how absurd of a statement that is.

You don't seem to know either since you don't elaborate on this. As said, people are picking this apart on Twitter and mastodon right now. Give it a week or two and I bet we'll see a couple CVEs from this.

For the rest of your post you seem to ignore the argument regarding attack surface, as well as the fact that there are companies not using this kind of software and apparently doing fine. But I guess we can just claim they are fully infiltrated and just don't know because they don't use crowdstrike. Are you working for crowdstrike by any chance?

But sure, at the end of the day you're just gonna weigh the damage this outage did to your bottom line and the frequency you expect this to happen with, against a potential hack - however you even come up with the numbers here, maybe crowdstrike salespeople will help you out - and maybe tell yourself it's still worth it.




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