Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgrin91 | Hacker News Reader

That sounds low... Really low. E.g. NYC has ~350k employees and I know they got hit hard. Not all of them have windows machines, but let's say 100k do. I know they basically all have falcon installed. That's 100k in just one org, not even counting their windows servers. How many Fortune 500s are mainly Windows?

Edit: I did some back of napkin math. ~30 million work for a fortune 500. Let's say 2/3rds of those have a Windows desktop provided by employer, so ~20M. I think I read crowdstrike has about ~25% market share, so that's 5 mil just in fortune 500. No way it's just 8.5M

View on HN

Crowdstrikes pricing is really unapproachable for smaller businesses and they aren't interested in that market. Your maths for the f500 may well cover more than half their business.

I thought annual pricing started around $60 per laptop for small businesses. That’s pretty approachable, IMO.

No it's not. Small businesses are used to paying $5-$15 for remote control, reporting, 3rd party patching, reports, automation, etc. Unless the business has huge margins, you're getting laughed out of the room @60.

$5-$15 per ~year~ you say?

I've seen three hundred user businesses told they won't even quote them a price.

They aborted the update rollout, so not every box that could have been affected was.

Well, what's more important is which devices compared to how many, because many many many consumer home PC's are running windows, and not all machines are equal. A windows server running a train station != grandmas PC, so when they say "it's only 1% of the windows fleet" they are missing out "it's all of the production machines that are running society"

Windows AND Crowdstrike. I work for a pretty large corporation and the only effects for us was a few third party applications. We use M365 extensively and didn't see any issues there at all either.

>How many Fortune 500s are mainly Windows?

Front end or back end?

Because the backend hasn't been windows in most places for a very long while.

You would be surprised. Yes Linux dominates, but there are many millions, easily billions of windows backend servers

You think there's "easily" the same order of magnitude Windows Server backend machines in the world as there are humans in the world?

I think they're way off with billions.

I do think there are a mountain of AD servers out there though. Not sure I care to quantify exactly how many makes a mountain. but I'd think 2 commas for sure. more than a million? less than 100 million? that seems like the right ballpark.

And Windows with Hyper V can also be found in the Backend of many shops with JTL et al being mostly windows focused.

Do they run crowdstrike though?

22% market share of the corporate anti-virus market, I read.

Its not only big corps, but hospitals, governments, mom and pops.

Crowdstrike was baaaaaaad.

My observation was that not 100% of devices with CrowdStrike had an issue and of those that did, about 70% recovered on their own after a few reboots.

How is it possible for some to recover on Thier own?

Apparently the "virus" definition data (whatever it is called) can be auto updated while the computer is booting. Not sure if the intention was for it to update before or after Crowdstrike is activated, but there is a racing condition where on some machines the update will execute before activating after a lot of attempts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com