https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOb3Dilzjc
Interconnected systems can fail spectacularly in unforeseen ways. Strange that something so obvious is so often dismissed or overlooked.
It’s a half-baked rootkit sold as a figleaf for incompetent it managers so they can implement ”best practices” in their companys PC:s.
The people purchasing it don’t actually know what it does, they just know it’s something they can invest their cybersecurity budget into and have an easy way to fullfill their ”implement cybersecurity” kpi:s without needing to do anything themselves.
To be fair. This is what companies like Crowdstrike are selling to these managers. Emphasis on the world "SELLING"
My rant is from a perspective in an org that most certainly was not a bank (b2b software/hardware) and there was enough of ruckus to tell it was not mandated there by any specific regulation (hence incompetence).
It's just that you can gamble compliance by claiming you have certain controls handled by purchasing crowdstrike... then leave it not properly deployed and without actual real security team in control of it (maybe there will be few underpaid and overworked people getting pestered by BS from management)
It's interesting that this is being referred to as a black swan event in the markets. If you look at the SolarWinds fiasco from a few years ago, there are some differences, but it boils down to problems with shitty software having too many privileges being deployed all over the place. It's a weak mono culture and eventually a plague will cause devastation. I think a screw up for these sorts of software models shouldn't really be thought of as a black swan event, but instead an inevitability.
There's a typo in there. "Do cyber" is how the said managers would phrase it.
CloudStrike is a little broader of course. But yeah, its a rootkit that we trust to protect us from other rootkits. Its like fighting fire with fire.
It doesn't really make your data "more secure" or "private".
It ran amok of every PC it was installed to. Nobody could tell exactly what it did, or why.
Engineering management attempted to argue against it. This resulted in quite public discourse which made the incompetence of the relevant parties in it-management related to it’s implementation obvious.
Not _negligently_ incompetent. Just incompetent enough that it was obvious they did not understand the system they administered from any set of core principles.
It was also obvious it was implemented only because ”it was a product you could buy to implement cybersecurity”. What this actually meant from systems architecture point of view was apparently irrelevant.
One could argue the only task of IT management is to act as a dumb middleman between the budget and service providers. So if it’s acceptable it managers don’t actually need to know anything of computers, then the claim of incompetence can of course be dropped.
Since the last of these involves overcoming everyone else's shared distress in admitting the emperor has no clothes, and the first of these involves a lot of distress for you personally, a lot of people opt for option B.
I don't disagree, but why do we do we react this way? Doesn't knowing the emperor has no clothes instill a bit of hope that things can change? I feel for the people who were impacted by this, but I'm also a little bit excited. Like... NOW can we fix it? Please?
The higher up in large organizations you go, in politics or employment or w/e, the more what matters is not facts, but avoiding being visibly seen to have made a mistake, so you become risk-averse, and just ride the status quo unless it's an existential threat to you or something you can capitalize on for someone else's misjudgment.
So if you can't directly gain from pointing out the emperor's missing clothes, there's no incentive to call it out, there's active risk to calling it out if other people won't agree, and moreover, this provides an active incentive for those with political capital in the organization to suppress the embarrassment of anyone pointing out they did not admit the problem everyone knew was there.
(This is basically how you get the "actively suppress any exceptions to people collectively treating something as a missing stair" behaviors.)
But often, at least in my experience, exceptions are limited in scope to whatever part of the org chart the person who is the exception is in charge of, and then that still governs everything outside of that box...
(Look all the recent, severe supply chain attacks by state actors, and how soon they have been displaced off-focus ...)
I mean, it already is to some people, as shown elsewhere in this thread. Seems like it's the wrong people though.
Having another I-told-you-so isn't so bad, though - it does give us IT people a little more latitude when we tell people that buying the insecurity fix du jour increases work and adds more problems than it addresses.
I'd just like it to be soon because I'm interested in building such systems and I'd rather be paid to do so instead of doing it on my off time.
Gonna make me a Tshirt outta this :)
Because doing three requires convincing a bunch of people that are currently doing number two, to do number one instead.