Global CrowdStrike Outage Proves How Fragile IT Systems Have Become | Hacker News Reader

Global CrowdStrike Outage Proves How Fragile IT Systems Have Become

nytimes.com

16 pointstrauco6 comments

It's not a question of fragile, it's a question of constantly bypassing the security that is supposed to be in place.

I can perfectly understand that my company refuses me to install an app on my laptop because it may cause security concerns (it my case, it was Tencent's WeChat app). What I don't understand is why I can't install my apps (which are very "normal" third party applications) on my company laptop, while at the same time there's apparently no issue to grant insane privileges to a third party application that allows god knows who to push updates without any check and literally brick workstations.

Regardless of anti-virus, threat detection, online games anti-cheat or whatever, no third party applications should be able to push updates over the air without the user being warned and consenting. period.

Another thing that also need to be highlighted is why everyone runs Windows ? We have all seen the pictures of the displays in the subways stations or the advertisement displays, screens showing the gates numbers at the airports etc... Does this kind of tool really requires a paid MS license to fulfill its purpose ? I mean, why MS Windows is necessary to display the number of a boarding gate & flight information in an airport ? Why not using a Raspberry Pi or something ? And most importantly, why a display showing the gate number in an airport has to be connected to the Internet ?

They've been this fragile for some considerable time. We've just been lucky, over and over again, that nothing of this seriousness has happened before.

Agreed, but I do believe it has gotten more serious the last 15 years with the centralization of most data centers among the big three (AWS, Microsoft, Google) and the increasing reliance for end user devices and software to be able to connect to them in order to function.

Now that a major worldwide outage has happened I'm curious what industry changes will take place going forward... If any...

They’ll just start to sell newly conjured insurance plans on top of their monthly cloud subscriptions

No change will take place because there is no incentive towards change.

One might say, well there was this huge outage, but in reality they will keep doing as they've done business as usual. They may spin up a new shell company, under a new name, and that will be far cheaper than devoting a budget to security in the first place. Rinse and repeat.

There has long been little to no liability for software flaws, and proving negligence is an uphill battle.

Just to clarify, System's Engineer's know how to build resilient systems that do not fail under most circumstances. It is only when corporate overlords decide to make the tradeoff of resiliency, for a little more penny pinching in the shares; that things like this happen.

It is a natural flaw of any centralized hierarchical system involving people. Corruption, Front of Line Blocking, are all just another term for Single Points of Failure.

Let’s keep outsourcing it to countries with cheap labor, that will surely keep going well

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