Turn off computer boot from previous day’s image, wipe current day’s image, continue using computer.
That’s all well and good, but many of these Windows machines were headless or used by extremely non-technical people - think tills at your supermarket or airport check-in desks. Worse, some of these installations were running in the cloud, so console access would have been tricky.
The cloud systems would have been a problem. Any local systems, a non-technical user, could have easily done because their IT department could simply tell them, turn on your computer, and when it gets to this screen with these words, press the down arrow key one time and press enter, and your computer will boot normally.
You wildly overestimate the average person’s willingness to do that.
I’m familiar enough with Linux but never used an immutable distro. I recognize the technical difference between what you describe and “go delete a specific file in safe mode”. But how about the more generic statement? Is this much different from “boot in a special way and go fix the problem”? Is any easier or more difficult than what people had to do on windows?
Primarily it’s different because you would not have had to boot into any safe mode. You would have just booted from the last good image from like a day ago and deleted the current image and kept using the computer.
Would still need to be on site.
Laypeople couldn’t fix it even more.
You mean like NixOS?
It wouldn’t technically stop anything, it would just make your live Hell on Earth if you tried to add that self-updating ring-0 proprietary software in your servers.
But I guess what you are looking for is immutable infrastructure? That one would stop the problem.
If the sensor was using eBPF (as any modern sensor on Linux should) then the faulty update would have made the sensor crash, but the system would still be stable. But CrowdStrike has a long history of using stupid forms of integration, so I wouldn’t put it past them to also load a kernel module that fucks things up unless it’s blacklisted in the bootloader. Fortunately that kind of recovery is, if not routine, at least well documented and standardized.
Immutable, not really a difference. Bad updates can still break the OS.
AB root, however, it would be much easier to fix, but would still be a manual process.
None. You’d still have to be on site for every machine.
