Microsoft gave CrowdStrike unfettered access to push an update that can BSOD every Windows machine without a bypass or failsafe in place. That turned out to be a bad idea.
They have to give that access by EU ruling:
Microsoft software licensing expert Rich Gibbons said: “Microsoft has received some criticism for the fact that a third party was able to affect Windows at such a deep technical level. It’s interesting that Microsoft has pointed out the fact this stems from a 2009 EU anti-competition ruling that means Microsoft must give other security companies the same access to the Windows kernel as they have themselves.”
patrick@piefed.social 4 months ago
Microsoft did not "give Crowdstrike access to push updates". The IT departments of the companies did.
The security features that Crowdstrike has forces them to run in kernel-space, which means that they will have code running that can crash the OS. They crashed Debian in an almost identical way (forced boot loop) about a month before they did the same to Windows.
Yes, there are ways that Microsoft could rewrite the Windows kernel architecture to make it resistant to this type of failure. But I don't think there are very many other commercial OS's that could stop this from happening.
breg@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
You’re absolutely right, here is an in-depth explanation from Dave Plummer, the guy who wrote the task manager: youtu.be/ZHrayP-Y71Q