IT administrators are struggling to deal with the ongoing fallout from the faulty CrowdStrike update. One spoke to The Register to share what it is like at the coalface.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the administrator, who is responsible for a fleet of devices, many of which are used within warehouses, told us: “It is very disturbing that a single AV update can take down more machines than a global denial of service attack. I know some businesses that have hundreds of machines down. For me, it was about 25 percent of our PCs and 10 percent of servers.”
He isn’t alone. An administrator on Reddit said 40 percent of servers were affected, along with 70 percent of client computers stuck in a bootloop, or approximately 1,000 endpoints.
Sadly, for our administrator, things are less than ideal.
Another Redditor posted: "They sent us a patch but it required we boot into safe mode.
"We can’t boot into safe mode because our BitLocker keys are stored inside of a service that we can’t login to because our AD is down.
Why the fuck does an antivirus need a kernel driver
Because that’s where filesystem access lives? AV wouldn’t do very much good if it could only run from userspace.
Because the windows OS is inherently insecure with lots of permission elevation opportunities.
Pretending linux privelege escalation doesn’t exist… to fight something that gets root you have to be able to fight at the root level, or the root access malware can simply nuke the av from userland.
Or you could just use kernel namespaces, SELinux, Systemd sandboxing, etc. There is zero need to run in ring 0 for security reasons.
Also, privilege escalation is a lot rarer on Linux than it is on Windows.