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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> Windows is not the issue here.

Yes it is. Windows was created for the "Personal Computer" with zero thought initially put in to security. It has been fighting that heritage for 30 years. The reason Crowdstrike exists at all is due to shortcomings (real or perceived) in Windows security.

Unix (and hence Linux and MacOS) was designed as a multi-user system from the start, so access controls and permissions were there from the start. It may have been a flawed security model and has been updated over time, but at least it started some notion of security. These ideas had already expanded to networks before Microsoft ever heard the word Netscape.

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> was designed as a multi-user system from the start, so access controls and permissions were there from the start.

Right and Windows NT wasn't? Obviously it supported all of those things from the very beginning (possibly even in a superior way to Unix in some cases considering it's a significantly more modern OS)...

The fact that MS developed another OS called Windows (3.1 -> 95 -> 98) prior to that which was to some extent binary compatible with NT seems somewhat tangential. Otherwise the same arguments would surely apply to MacOS as well?

> These ideas had already expanded to networks before Microsoft ever heard the word Netscape.

Does not seem like a good thing on its own to me. Just solidifies the fact the it's an inherently less modern OS than Windows(NT) (which still might have various design flaws obviously, that might be worth discussing, it just has nothing to do whatsoever with what you're claiming here...)

We have Crowdstrike on our Linux fleet. It is not merely a malware scanner but is capable of identifying and stopping zero-day attacks that attempt local privilege escalation. It can, for example, detect and block attempts to exploit CVE-2024-3094 - the xz backdoor.

Perhaps we need to move to an even more restrictive design like Fuschia, or standardize on an open source eBPF based utility that's built, tested, and shipped with a distribution's specific kernel, but Windows is not the issue here.

Security is a complex and deeply evolved field. Many modern required security practices are quite recent from a historical perspective because we simply didn't know we would need them.

A safe security first OS from 20 years ago would most likely be horribly insecure now.

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