This is a good writeup, but to be fair it's just not a matter of banking regulations. Basically all big companies are under similar obligations regarding endpoint protection.
Unlike normal software development, anti-malware software has to be resilient against all kinds of tampering. The price for having an os that isn't heavily locked down and tamper resistant due to hardware enabled checks is having to rely on kernel mode code to enforce tamper resistance. Evasion is another issue, you can already hook api calls from user space (some EDRs do this) but evading it as a privileged user is trivial. It boils down to how on x86/x64 the cpu enforces 3 major privilege rings, by design things that are integrated with the OS that require OS level privileges and system wide access must run in the same ring as the OS (ring0/kernel mode).
There are many ways to tackle this but I haven't heard of any (even from Microsoft's blogs/proposals after the incident) that won't reduce the capabilities and tamper/evasion resiliency of these security softwares. if x64 had a "secure world" concept like ARM for example, that would be different but it doesn't.
Maybe not. Intel is considering removing rings 1 and 2 for a future 64-bit only x86 architecture, because they "are unused by modern software".
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
And the reason why not is simple. Anything that Microsoft thinks is a good thing to add to the API, they'll add for themselves. When the new API is released, their software is released with it. This gives them a competitive advantage over competitors who have to wait for Microsoft to have the idea that they want, and then scramble to implement it after Microsoft does.
The EU is suspicious of this for the simple reason that Microsoft has a several decade history of doing exactly that. Repeatedly. My favorite example being the release of Windows 95 with Microsoft Word available at the same time, and with WordPerfect unable to run. By the time WordPerfect had figured out how to port their software to Windows 95, they were no longer the market leader.
That is somewhat revisionist history. WordPerfect admitted at the time they saw OS/2 as the future and were focused on that. Only in hindsight did they realize OS/2 was going nowhere (too bad, it was better than 95) and had to rush to get a WordPerfect for 95. Worse for them, they wrote each release of WordPefect in platform specific code (mostly assembly) so it wasn't a case of port to 95 it was a case of start over mostly from scratch.
Yes WordPerfect lost to Word with 95 - but it was bad decisions on WordPerfect's part. They had opportunity to get WordPerfect on 95 much faster. I don't know if it would have been fast enough, but they didn't even try until it was too late.
The use of platform specific code was a performance necessity at the time, everyone did it. Part of the promise of Windows 95 was that it could run your Windows 3.1 programs. They bent over backwards for a ton of programs, but not WordPerfect. Microsoft also had an early access program to Windows 95. WordPerfect applied for it - and was denied access. After that the OS/2 bet was their only real hope.
The truth is that Microsoft had a long and documented history of using one monopoly to leverage into another. Over and over again they lost antitrust lawsuits, but internally regarded them as speeding tickets on the way to greater monopoly power. This history showed up in court. The internal documentation on the WordPerfect case showed up in the Netscape case, and is part of why Mocrosoft won.
It wasn't until the EU started charging Microsoft over $400 million per day for noncompliance in 2006 that Microsoft's attitude started to change. Now I see them as just normal big guys with a worse than average history. But back in the 90s and early 2000s? They EARNED the title of "evil empire".
It was full of ad infested solutions, which would crash your computer from time to time.
Defender at least was reasonably performant and tended to be stable.
You could say that since they had access to kernel source, they were better informed, but I guess if there was an API, the provided documentation would solve the issue (not necessarily, not everyone bothers to read the docs).
But then you get back on how to enforce equal and open access for everyone (the EU did try to make Microsoft open the Word file format, but turned out it was so complicated and documented in legacy code only, that Micorsoft had trouble giving useful docs)
Anyway, as you said, it's complicated...
If I write a new OS how will you force the "word processing, video conferencing, and music-selling" companies to write code for it? If they don't write the above my OS is worthless, but if my OS fails in the market anyway they just wasted a lot of money. This is why OS companies tend to have the other things, their OS cannot exist in a vacuum and the only way to ensure they have those needed tools is to write them themselves.
Nobody wants to try to be selling consumer software that is optimized for the out of date and unsupported version of the OS.
https://redmondmag.com/articles/2014/04/28/court-nixes-novel...
The case brought to light an Oct. 3, 1994 memo from then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who indicated that Microsoft should withhold namespace extension APIs in Windows 95 from its competitors, WordPerfect and IBM, in order to gain market advantage for Microsoft Word.
In other words, your revisionist history is wrong. Microsoft really was big enough. We know that because WordPerfect asked for early access to Windows 95. It was Microsoft who turned them down. (And no, I don't believe Gate's testimony about security. I think that Gates was bamboozling the judge, and the judge bought it.)
(I had misremembered which court case brought that memo to light. But regardless, it was obvious to the whole industry at the time. Incidentally this memo came while Microsoft was under a consent decree signed on July 25, 1994 with the Justice Department to not try to maintain their monopoly by tying specific products to Windows. Technically, they didn't here, but they were walking the line. They crossed the line with IE though, and that later resulted in the Netscape loss.)
As for BeOS, the question was how a LEADING operating system company was supposed to cope with getting software for the next version of their OS. No matter how many good things we can say about BeOS, they never got to the point of being a leading operating system company.
If you could prevail on a government to decide that, maybe it could work.
One thing I see, is that AV has a component of maintaining a DB of signatures of bad things. This does not seem at all the job of the core os. Would the Debian team maintain such a DB?
The ultimate lesson then is to stop using MS stuff.
The fact that Microsoft abandoned it as soon as a regulator pointed out how anti-competitive the design of the API was makes you wonder what Microsoft's true intention was. To me that implies the anti-competitive design was its main feature and to Microsoft it would've been pointless to continue without it.
But another way of looking at this would be that perhaps they wanted to be the beta testers of the API themselves because opening it up would have been a maintenance liability for the company. Microsoft tends to be pretty good about backwards compatibility in ways that Apple is not.
We also don't know that these APIs were cancelled, they may make it into future versions of windows.
On Windows.
And as mentioned elsewhere, an eBPF module behaving badly but in valid ways can still make your system pretty unusable.
Unless the OS is locked down to the point that even its owner cannot do that. Actually, this is something I like about Operational Technology, you run into a lot of doodads where the elevation process requires turning a physical key, and the device's main functionality is disabled while it is in service mode. Ofc the doodad has to be engineered to operate reliably, perpetually, for years, and you cant really expect that from a desktop computer.
Even on home machines where no user has a password, having to do something special to get into administrator mode will stop several attacks just because people will slow down and ask.
Also, if you want to stop everyone from using administrator accounts, the simplest way is to not have the Windows installer/OOBE setup make an administrator account first.
Windows has a built-in Administrator account already not unlike Root in Linux, there is no reason (other than tradition and absolute convenience) the Windows installer/OOBE setup needs to make an administrator account for the user installing/setting up.
This would just result in more UAC prompts and thus annoyed users who get taught to click on "Allow" whenever a dialog pops up.
If such outages were more frequent, then it could definitely become a liability. But such risks have to be balanced against the risk of being compromised and leaking customer data and other confidential trade secrets, and the risk posed by the latter one is far higher, not to say it's also more common.
It's the only way to detect certain types of advanced threats.
All of these requirements essentially become transitive across a company's entire supply chain.
* Big bank needs to comply with X, so do all of their vendors.
* Vendor wants to sell to big bank, so they comply with X. They also need all of their vendors to comply with X.
* So on and so on.
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Ultimately, there are a lot more options than CrowdStrike, but this is a case of "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM". Even if CrowdStrike isn't the "best", it's good enough. Because it's use is sooo widespread, an issue with it often affects dozens and dozens of other companies when you're affected. One of the great things about this effect is everyone "goes down at the same time", so people don't tend to point fingers at you. In fact, they might not have any clue you're down because some other, more critical system is down internally and preventing them from accessing you.
I remember a similiar situation happening a few years back. A big outage hit large parts of the internet. A pretty major part of our app got taken offline with this outage. This was a known risk and something that we accepted. We expected some backlash and inquires if this situation should ever happen. It was a calculated risk to dedicate more effort towards building customer-facing value.
I think we got one inquiry. It was basically just an FYI. This person had so many things broken on their end that "one more thing" being broken was just a drop in the bucket.
On the other hand, count me surprised at the sales prowess of Crowdstrike, I did not know how big they were.