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Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

CrowdStrike let's you create update strategies and rollout groups.

This update bypassed all of those settings.

Well that context makes it make a little more sense... I still wouldn't be trusting a service like that for mission critical hardware that shouldn't be connected to the internet in the first place.

The question with these types of services is: is your goal to keep the system as reliable as possible, or to be able to place the blame on a 3rd party when it goes down? If it's a critical safety system that human lives depend on, the answer better be the former.

How do you keep an airline ticketing system offline? How would anybody book tickets without access to the databases?

Whitelist the persistent store?

you don't need to airgap it. just limit the access to the specific APIs/access to the database and block everything else.

CrowdStrike won't be able to upgrade itself through your database API...

If you must trust the software not to do rogue updates then I have to swing back into the camp of blaming the operating system. Is Linux better at this?

I've noticed phones have better permissions controls than Windows, seemingly. You can control things like hardware access and file access at the operating system level, it's very visible to the user, and the default is to deny permissions.

But I've also noticed that phone apps can update outside of the official channel, if they choose. Is there any good way to police this without compromising the capabilities of all apps?

Microsoft has tried pushing app deployment and management platforms that would make this kind of thing really possible, but it constantly receives massive pushback. This was the concept of stuff like Windows S, where pretty much all apps have to be the new modern store app package and older "just run the install.exe as admin and double click the shortcut to run" was massively deprecated or impossible.

you wouldn't be trusting it.

But that's besides the point in any enterprise environment. Or even in a SMB where third parties are doing IT stuff for you. Your opinion doesn't matter there. Compliance matters. Paper Risk aversion matters. And they don't always align with common IT sense and, as had been proven now, reality.

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