Not like hackers haven’t done the same.
These security software vendors have found a wonderful tacit moat: they have managed to infect various questionnaire templates by being present in a short list of "pre-vetted and known" choices in a dropdown/radiobutton menu. If you select the sane option ("other"), you get to explain to technically inept bean counters why you did so.
Repeat that for every single regulator, client auditing team, insurance company, etc. ... and soon enough someone will decide it's easier and cheaper to pick an option that gets you through the blind-leading-the-blind question karaoke with less headaches.
Remember: vast majority of so-called security products are sold to people high up in the management chain, but they are inflicted upon their victims. The incentives are perverse, and the outcomes accordingly predictable.
Tell them it’s for preserving diversity in the field.
For anyone browsing the thread archive in the future: you can have that quip in your back pocket and use it verbally when having to discuss the bingo sheet results with someone competent. It's a good bit of extra material, but it can not[ß] be your sole reason. The term you do want to remember is "additional benefit".
The reasons you actually write down boil down to four things. High-level technical overview of your chosen solution. Threat model. Outcomes. And compensating controls. (As cringy as that sounds.)
If you can demonstrate that you UNDERSTAND the underlying problem, and consider each bingo sheet entry an attempt at tackling a symptom, you will be on firmer ground. Focusing on threat model and the desired outcomes helps to answer the question, "what exactly are you trying to protect yourself from, and why?"
ß: I face off with auditors and non-technical security people all the time. I used to face off with regulators in the past. In my experience, both groups respond to outcome-based risk modeling. But you have to be deeply technical to be able to dissect and explain their own questions back to them in terms that map to reality and the underlying technical details.
With that said, Microsoft could've done this with Defender just as easily, so be mindful of system diversity in your business continuity and disaster recovery plans and enterprise architecture. Heterogeneous systems can have inherent benefits.
https://apnews.com/article/tech-outage-crowdstrike-microsoft...
> “This is a function of the very homogenous technology that goes into the backbone of all of our IT infrastructure,” said Gregory Falco, an assistant professor of engineering at Cornell University. “What really causes this mess is that we rely on very few companies, and everybody uses the same folks, so everyone goes down at the same time.”
The irony is the NHS likely installed CrowdStrike as a direct reaction to WannaCry.
At large-scale, you don’t solve problems, you only replace them with smaller ones.
If you want actually good payout, your crypto locker has to either encrypt network filesystems, or infect crucial core systems (domain controllers, database servers, the filers directly, etc).
Ransomware getting smarter about sideways movement, and proper data exfiltration etc attacks, are part of what led to proliferation of requirements for EDRs like Crowdstrike, btw
But that's besides the point. Point is, attacks distributed over time and space ultimately make the overall system more resilient; an attack happening everywhere at once is what kills complex systems.
> Ransomware getting smarter about sideways movement, and proper data exfiltration etc attacks, are part of what led to proliferation of requirements for EDRs like Crowdstrike, btw
To use medical analogy, this is saying that the pathogens got smarter at moving around, the immune system got put on a hair trigger, leading to a cytokine storm caused by random chance, almost killing the patient. Well, hopefully our global infrastructure won't die. The ultimate problem here isn't pathogens (ransomware), but the oversensitive immune system (EDRs).