Please liberate us Presinald Trunt, my people yearn for the possibility of our society’s entire technological infrastructure randomly collapsing and burying us in the rubbleI feel like there is an opportunity to talk about employer instated spyware culture is being missed here.
Better opportunity to talk about how your machines are held hostage by closed-source fascist CIAware.
Would you elaborate on that?
The issue was caused by a software that is designed to collect data from the computer and send it to a centralised location. It’s intrusive enough that it needs to run at kernel level. The issue was caused because it auto-updates itself. The recent update was borked causing the auto-update attempt to send it into a bootloop.
It’s a software that employers install on their employees’ work computers. I don’t know exactly how this kind of spying is helpful to the employer. But if it just run in the userspace this particular problem wouldn’t have happened.
Thanks. That’s helpful.
Funfact, we actually opt in to the feature to stay a version behind on updates, specifically to prevent this kind of thing from happening. Turns out that is a fucking lie because we still got this update.
Any chance of suing them or something like that?
Would be nice to see some extra blowback from this too.
They pissed off enough of the powers that be (read: corporations) that I would be surprised if they made it through this intact. I wouldn’t be surprised if they crashed and got acquired by one of the tech giants. Which I hope is the case, friendly reminder that crowdstrike was one of the key sources of all the russiagate bullshit.
indeed
Great Firewall win
I work hospitality IT and this has been an absolute nightmare. I think I have got 30 minutes sleep in the past 24 hours, and it’s looking like that is going to continue for the next week or so. Days off are straight out the window.
They managed to brick PCs so badly that we have to individually triage servers and endpoints because we can’t even get PCs up long enough to deploy the fix*. Lord help if your endpoints are bitlocker encrypted (ours are) as that just adds another fun step. Good chance that you won’t have all the recovery keys in that case.
*The fix being literally just deleting the malware they uploaded to our PCs. It takes seconds but the song and dance of getting to that file to delete it is way more involved.
That sounds absolutely brutal.
It was. We have basically 100% recovered at this point, but not without exhaustive work from our teams.
I am currently making sure that every property gives their IT proper overtime pay and a vacation. Then I will be doing the same for myself. Hopefully this will also be incentive for properties to actually hire enough IT workers.
At least there’s overtime pay and vacation to look forward to. In the US, most people will be forced to do overtime with no compensation.
The only reason we get that is I have the good fortune to be in a high enough position I can push for it. I have no illusions that the higher-ups would okay it if they weren’t being forced to. Even then I had to make calls to every office to make sure they were actually following through.
Lucky you’re in a position to actually make that happen.
Well, it’s not your fault Windows is dogshit. I refuse to build, repair, admin or maintain any system running a non-FOSS operating system. 16 years later and it’s still the best professional decision I ever made. Remind your employer this is their fault and the inevitable outcome for using unsecurable spyware on their machines.
It’s a big multinational so those decisions are way up the food chain from me, but my reports and my bosses have all been saying this for years. Hopefully now they listen to us.
I feel ya. I’ve had pretty limited success getting companies to get rid of bad software.
“Can’t you… just… umm… patch it or something???”
So glad windows isn’t my problem. But I’m sorry for your stress and loss of sleep, mate.
china is reaching levels of basedness long thought impossible
They escaped because they don’t use the US intelligence connected backdoor company and DNC shill “crowdstrike” which lied about Russian actors attacking the DNC as part of the Russiagate hoax and banked off that for some time after.
They’d be deranged to use any US “security” company as they’re all full of “ex” NSA/CIA/FBI and a fat clear pipeline of info, spying enabling, etc back to those agencies. The US of course slanders the rest of the world with projection to cover up things like this, to cover up the Snowden revelations of them being an empire of spies. They say Chinese/Russian companies can’t be trusted because they have some people with friends in intelligence but no proof of these countries crossing the lines like the US did. No proof of hardware implants like the US did with Cisco to China. No proof that the US is anything but an extraordinary bad faith actor who can’t play by any rules but the rules of “one set of rules for me, another for thee”.
I fucking hate a lot of these next-gen endpoint detection and remediation companies. Them, Mandiant, other fuckers in the US are little better than private sockpuppets of the CIA/FBI/US State department. Regularly claiming China or Russia hacked this or that which is so convenient for their masters. Never acting more circumspect about the evidence and declaring that they can’t be certain but it says x,y,z and letting people draw their own conclusions without raising geopolitical tensions as responsible actors should. Because they’re not responsible actors. They’re not even really security companies. They are organs of geopolitical containment, propaganda, messaging, and defense against the multipolar world and for US hegemony.
Somewhat related article that ppl might find interesting:
- In 2020, it was revealed that the Swiss company, Crypto AG, which provided secure communications services to ~120 governments throughout the 20th century, was secretly ran by the CIA and West German Intelligence. The CIA and later NSA were able to read encrypted communications for many countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Italy, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Jordan and South Korea.
Part of a long history. After WW2 the west gave away enigma machines to developing nations. They had by this point cracked it and thus could read the messages but told no one for decades.
Good old Operation Rubicon. Soviets saw straight through it… euros not so much.
There is no variation of Windows that isn’t CIAware. Complaining about extra backdoors and bloat in a unsecurable, backdoored, closed source bloatware OS is time better spent learning and using the alternatives.
