Reputational damage from this is going to be catastrophic. Even if that’s the limit of their liability it’s hard not to see customers leaving en masse.
Ironically some /r/wallstreetbets poster put out an ill-informed “due diligence” post 11 hours ago concerning CrowdStrike being not worth $83 billion and placing puts on the stock.
Everybody took the piss out of them for the post. Now they are quite likely to become very rich.
Not sure what material in their post is ill-informed. Looks like what happened today is exactly what that poster warned of in one of their bullet points.
Yea, everyone is dunking on OP here. But they essentially said that crowdstrike's customers were all vulnerable to something like this. And we saw a similar thing play out only a few years ago with SolarWinds. It's not surprising that this happened. Ofc with making money the timing is the crucial part which is hard to predict.
Is the alternative "mass hacking"? I thought all this software did was check a box on some compliance list. And slow down everyone's work laptop by unnecessarily scanning the same files over and over again.
As someone said earlier in these comments the software is required if you want to operate with government entities. So until that requirement changes it is not going anywhere and continues to print money for the company.
But then, if what you say is true and their software is indeed mandatory in some context, they also have no incentive or motivation to care about the quality of their product, about it bringing actual value or even about it being reliable.
They may just misuse this unique position in the market and squeeze as much profit from it as possible.
The mere fact that there exists such a position in the market is, in my opinion, a problem because it creates an entity which has a guaranteed revenue stream while having no incentive to actually deliver material results.
If the government agencies insist on using this particular product then you're right. If it's a choice between many such products than there should be some competition between them.
From experiencing different AV products at various jobs, they all use kernel level code to do their thing, so any one of them can have this situation happen.
You, the admin, don't get to see what Falcon is doing before it does it.
Your security ppl. have a dashboard that might show them alerts from selected systems if they've configured it, but Crowdstrike central can send commands to agents without any approval whatsoever.
We had a general login/build host at my site that users began having terrible problems using. Configure/compile stuff was breaking all the time. We thought...corrupted source downloads, bad compiler version, faulty RAM...finally, we started running repeated test builds.
Guy from our security org then calls us. He says: "Crowdstrike thinks someone has gotten onto linux host <host>, and has been trying to setup exploits for it and other machines on the network; it's been killing off the suspicious processes but they keep coming back..."
We had to explain to our security that it was a machine where people were expected to be building software, and that perhaps they could explain this to CS.
"No problem; they'll put in an exception for that particular use. Just let us know if you might running anything else unusual that might trigger CS."
TL;DR-please submit a formal whitelist request for every single executable on your linux box so that our corporate-mandate spyware doesn't break everyone's workflow with no warning.
Extremely unlikely. This isn't the first blowup Crowdstrike has had; though it's the worst (IIRC), Crowdstrike is "too big to fail" with tons of enterprise customers who have insane switching costs, even after this nonsense.
Unfortunately for all of us, Crowdstrike will be around for awhile.
Businesses would be crazy to continue with Crowdstrike after this. It's going to cause billions in losses to a huge number of companies. If I was a risk assessment officer at a large company I'd be speed dialling every alternative right now.
A friend of mine who used to work for Crowdstrike tells me they're a hot mess internally and it's amazing they haven't had worse problems than this already.
That sounds like any other companies I have ever worked for: looks great from the outside but a hot mess on the inside.
I have never worked for a company where everything is smooth sailing.
What I noticed is that the smaller the company, the less hot mess they are but at the same time they're also struggling to pay the bill because they don't innovate fast.
