Remember guys, it took about a decade for Solar Winds to discover somebody had root access to everybody that used their software, another decade for somebody outside Solar Winds to discover it and tell everybody, and half a decade with nobody claiming to have solved the issue up to now.
So when you believe that your computer with an EDS is safe just because you can't use it, think again.
The fact that random companies like Crowdstrike have kernel drivers in millions of computers they they ship remotely is a security risk in and of itself. We're lucky crowdstrike just shipped a bug that crashes computers, other companies could have shipped a lot worse.
Code review, QA team, hours of being baked on an internal test network, incremental exponential roll out to the world, starting slow so that any problems can be immediately rolled back. If they didn't have those basics, they have no business being a tech company, let alone a security company who puts out windows drivers.
Yeah, something this big is absolutely not one engineer's fault. Even if that engineer maliciously pushed an update, it's not their fault --- it was a complete failure of the organization, and one person having the ability to wreck havoc like this is the failure.
And I actually have some amount of hope that, in this case, it is being recognized as such.
Also: don't trust your employees to boot into safe mode.
Trust a 3rd party to freely install system level files at any time.
I knew how to fix the computers at work today in the morning, but we couldn't get through to the help desk to get the bit locker codes for each computer until near the end of the day.
Smaller = less attack surface. You can strip a Linux OS down to only what is needed.
Open source, so it's can be peered review. There are Unix distros like OpenBSD, that share lot of user space component options, where auditing is a big thing. The whole sunlight and oxygen stops things festering as much. As abosed to things locked in a box in another box down in a cellar.
Open source transparency forces corporates to be better. We can see what they are and aren't doing.
Diversity. The is no "Linux", it's a ecosystem of Linux distros all built and configured differently, using different components. Think of Linux as just a type of base board in a sea of Unix Lego bits. There are plenty of big deployments on BSD bases that share a lot with some Linux deployments.
Unix security is simplier than Windows security, so easer to not mess up.
That's...a gross oversimplification. Super popular open source projects tend to have few bugs from the sheer number of contributors available to fix them, but active proprietary software has dedicated teams working fulltime every week to deal woth issues. Proprietary stuff is often way wider in scope than open source, so more surface for bugs to creep in. Scope and team size have a lot more to do with bug density than open vs closed source.
target the largest market segment to gain the most conversions.
Windows market share is bigger in desktop only. In fact, is kinda sad that still there are serious institutions using Windows for non-desktop stuff. I hope this incident changes it.
the real difference is you need a few decades of linux experience to fix anything in a timely manner.
[ citation needed ]
Probably you are meaning desktop again. Although troubleshooting Windows is not easy task neither, there are way more desktop users familiar with it.
The real thing is
There is no single "linux" OS. There are lots of different OSes based on Linux kernel. And they are for servers, desktop, embedded systems, smartphones, etc.
More important. Security is a process, not a product from a vendor. The root cause of this incident is that some institutions are seeing that you just buy "security", install it, and call it a day. No important stuff should auto-update. And no institution should auto-update lots of important stuff at the same time.
So, Linux is not really more secure. But is built in a culture where security is taken more seriously.
In addition to what others have said, there's the move towards containerized applications on Linux via flatpaks, immutable distributions, and snapshots/rollbacks. There are also distributions like Debian with a delayed package release schedule for added stability and security. Its my understanding that you could have an exceptionally secure, effectively trustless, Linux system beyond what is possible on Mac or Windows.
If you follow the philosophy that it follows, that is, giving the least possible permission to any application, to make it work, it easily becomes much more secure than Windows.
On the other hand, if you log into your GUI desktop as root, Bill Gates save you.
There is nothing Microsoft I would consider "top tier" when it comes to security.
Defender does a great job for many AV tasks. Crowdstrike does more, and protection isn't tied to windows updates.
This isn't a situation where companies just chose not to use the free item, the free item has other costs (management overhead) and is missing some features.
The best answer, of course, is to not use windows for anything that needs to be secure.
Edit: For those who think I'm wrong, cool. I'm not but you are welcome to disagree.
There is a difference between the free defender and paid for defender. If you're a home user, check out defenderui.com to get (many, not all) features that are normally limited to intune/gpo.
A full and proper deployed defender stack is very good, but in terms of management.... The approach to different os's is practically cobbled together, the webui is horrific, and it lacks some basic functionality. A problem to manage a system like this is a problem to deploy a system like this.
If you're on the free Defender level, you are not getting anywhere near the same features as falcon, there is absolutely zero question about that.
The best answer, of course, is to not use windows for anything that needs to be secure.
Edit: For those who think I'm wrong, cool. I'm not but you are welcome to disagree.
Linux admins here: Quiet nods and knowing looks.
Windows admins here: quiet awkward glances at each other to see if anyone wants to defend MS today.
Mac admins here: quiet awkward glances to see if anyone feels like this was any better than a coin toss chance of happening just to Macs, today, instead.