Sanctioned Russia Emerges Unscathed in Global IT Outage (yahoo.com) 110
Russian officials boasted on Friday that Moscow was spared the impact of the global IT systems outage because of its increased self-sufficiency after years of Western sanctions, though some experts said Russian systems could still be vulnerable. From a report: Microsoft and other IT firms have suspended sales of new products in Russia and have been scaling down their operations in line with sanctions imposed over Russia's war in Ukraine, which Moscow describes as a special military operation. The Kremlin, along with companies from state nuclear giant Rosatom, which operates all of Russia's nuclear plants, to major lenders and airlines, reported no glitches amid the outage that affected international companies across the globe. "The situation once again highlights the significance of foreign software substitution," Russia's digital development ministry said. Russian financial and currency markets also ran smoothly.
"Global IT outage" (Score:2, Informative)
... not a single mention anywhere of how this only affected Microsoft customers. Linux, BSD, and OSX were all unaffected, too. Way to bury the lead.
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It's "bury the lede", but you're not wrong. They glossed over the fact that only Windows users were affected.
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though some experts said Russian systems could still be vulnerable.
Talk about a useless sentence, too. Practically all connected systems are vulnerable to the right attack. Russia was spared because it doesnt use those services, like OS X users and Linux users.
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Yep. "Some experts" and "could" are the key-terms here. In other words, the statement is total bullshit and basically a lie.
The rest of the world would do well to detach itself from the MS monoculture as well. But I guess that will take some really large catastrophes. The scary thing is that Russia is now significantly ahead in IT.
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Thanks.
Re:"Global IT outage" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: "Global IT outage" (Score:2)
And? That didn't BSOD a shit ton of computers
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And? That didn't BSOD a shit ton of computers
I would have preferred the BSOD. Instead, I had about a dozen hours worth of outage... along with a shit ton of computers.
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It did shut down a shit ton of businesses.
Therefore it had a similar effect.
Also Microsoft keeps fucking up Azure over and over again.
Re: "Global IT outage" (Score:2, Informative)
Metric, damnit! METRIC! (Score:2)
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"shit ton" ?
Is that one of them new millenial / Gen-whatever words like "performant" that mean something but only to that cliquey crowd ?
I think the first time I ever heard it was about 30 years ago.
Are you new?
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It's not new. My father used that when I was a kid.
It just means a very large amount of something, usually something unpleasant. E.g. "this will need a shit ton of paperwork."
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Re: "Global IT outage" (Score:1)
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oh is someone going to die cause excel didn't work? what about when 911 doesn't work?
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CrowdStrike runs on VAX? That's more newsworthy than yet another Microsoft disaster.
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Well, let's say its successor: VMS runs on VAX, which was the predecessor of WNT, of which W200X and W1X are successors.
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... Linux, BSD, and OSX were all unaffected, too.
Not entirely true. The Crowdstrike issue may have only affected Microsoft hosts, but the configuration issue in the Azure Central US region last night took out VMs even if they were Linux.
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You may not have looked into what happened. Cloudstrike has their own "antivirus" functionality, which comes in the form of a device driver. In this case, the update that got pushed out caused BSoD problems. If a company that handles infrastructure services for others gets knocked down because THEY use Cloudstrike, suddenly their clients end up with service interruptions. Anyone that uses the services of a company affected by the outage in turn have their own services impacted by the problem.
Problem
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Dependency on these expensive cloud based systems is ridiculous. Security is surprisingly cheap and easy and doesn't require half of the mega-buck solutions out there if people realize that IT isn't about making users happy. It's about making the systems run for business use and nothing else. Whitelist based security makes security SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper and easier than the alternatives. Identify the absolute bare minimums that each system and user needs for authorized business activities and then set the sy
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I work in IT security and have been doing it this way for 20 years now. It is very much that easy. Getting buy in from the executive level is the tough part. I have left jobs that WON'T let me do it this way because I refuse to pander to the people that want to spend mega bucks when it really is as easy as saying no. My job is not to make people happy. My job is to make the systems run for business purposes and business purposes only. Everything else does not run on the systems that I manage.
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It's always that way. The media reports Microsoft problems as IT problems or computer problems. I think it's ignorance rather than deliberate misdirection.
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MS always does a lot of sweeping things under the rug and they are good at it. The lying by misdirection you call out is just one instance. In addition, there are a_lot_ of useful idiots shilling for Microsoft without even getting paid for it. No idea how severely defective you have to be mentally to do such a thing.
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Russia got sanctioned out of the 'Too Big to Fail' clubs. Sanctions made them anti-fragile. No wonder, they might survive many of the large-scale disasters yet to come.
well considerting (Score:2)
Russia is one of the main sources that we have to protect ourselves from ...
Re: well considerting (Score:2)
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Yes - I rather assume that the CrowdStrike customers are trying to protect their installations from hackers based in Russia. Russia neither has access to Crowdstrike nowadays, nor the need to protect themselves - a lot of the trojans and virii specifically check for Russian keyboard maps and don't bother breaking things if they find them.
Yeah, but (Score:2)
Yeah, but who wants to deal with CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and WIN.INI these days?
Re: Would you rather (Score:1)
Absolutely positively (Score:2)
Yes, sitting in the dark with no power will indeed keep you safe from the Crowdstrike boo-boo.
Also, if you have no sophisticated infrastructure and no money to buy Crowdstrike services, you'll be safe.
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Yes, sitting in the dark with no power will indeed keep you safe from the Crowdstrike boo-boo.
Russia is many things, but energy poor, they are not.
Also, if you have no sophisticated infrastructure and no money to buy Crowdstrike services, you'll be safe.
Russia is many things, but unsophisticated and poor, they also are not. Russia sells natural gas, oil, and have a pretty developed defense and tech industry. It isn't as strong as we have in the USA, but it absolutely bests Europe's and rivals China's. Speaking of China.....
Re:Absolutely positively (Score:5, Informative)
Russia is, in fact, dirt poor per capita. Not as dirt poor as Ukraine, which made the sight of Russian invaders looting Ukrainians all the more disgusting, but they're still on average extremely poor for a country that wants people to believe that it's a "superpower". What Russia does have is enormous disparity between the rich and poor. There are plenty of rich people, especially in the West end of the country and, as a nation, Russia seems like it has tons of money to throw around on the things it thinks are important. Of course, most of the country's wealth and the wealth of its rich people comes from natural resources that are actually located in the poorest parts of Russia.
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If you look at the USA wealth distribution, it's becoming increasingly true here as well. It's also an accelerating trend over the past three decades. Pretty sure the phrase we are looking for is "Working as intended" or maybe "According to plan".
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We could also say that:
"Rich people depend more and more on money."
or
"Poor people learn to live with less and less."
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Ruzzia is now a net importer of petroleum products. They have had massive electricity network failures for weeks. Their airline fleet is down from 800 to 400ish and is being kept up with phony parts. Sophistication ends in the outer suburbs of the 2 major cities. They steal toilets.
Check out the quality of top-selling Buhanka Vans! https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Currently available drive-away for $US22k. (Fuel not always available. Official interest rate 18% may bring down 10% OFFICIAL inflation f
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Also annual GDP of ruzzia is about to be run over by Mexico. Most of the current Domestic Product value is shit that goes bang and is gone without bringing any benefit or future value. They are using fucking push-scooters, golf carts and the world's shittiest motor cycles on the front lines to move troops and supplies in fire zones. The whole fucking sewer is fucking fucked.
Their one chance of survival is naming a few hotels and golf courses after Trump and crawling up his arse.
They are being eaten up by
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Some parts of Russian are nice and somewhat modern, but the fact is that the vast majority of the county is poor as shit.
Except for the cities, their infrastructure is garbage and non-existent in many places. Less than 1/2 of Russians own cars, fewer still "own" a home. College education is spotty, shitty, and often worthless since many teachers are happy to accept bribes.
Don't spin me your fucking stories about Russia, the country is 50 years behind the rest of the world. They were still using vacuum tube
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Some parts of Russian are nice and somewhat modern, but the fact is that the vast majority of the county is poor as shit.
Except for the cities, their infrastructure is garbage and non-existent in many places. Less than 1/2 of Russians own cars, fewer still "own" a home. College education is spotty, shitty, and often worthless since many teachers are happy to accept bribes.
Don't spin me your fucking stories about Russia, the country is 50 years behind the rest of the world. They were still using vacuum tube electronics in their fighter planes in the 80s.
It's a crude, nasty shithole for the most part. Even the major cities are run down and dilapidated.
Just to point out, they did not only use vacuum tubes due to a technological disparity in microelectronics, which definitely existed, but because a thermionic valve is almost entirely immune to an overload from an EMP, of the type a nuclear weapon produces. We (the US in my case) had to come up with complex shielding arrangements and other engineering feats to work around a problem they completely avoided by choosing a different technological branch.
There are many examples of this in Soviet technology, nece
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Just to point out, they did not only use vacuum tubes due to a technological disparity in microelectronics, which definitely existed, but because a thermionic valve is almost entirely immune to an overload from an EMP, of the type a nuclear weapon produces. We (the US in my case) had to come up with complex shielding arrangements and other engineering feats to work around a problem they completely avoided by choosing a different technological branch.
I would be willing to wager everything in my bank account that an EMP could drop every technologically superior, current-year drone, F-35 and F-22 in the US arsenal at this time.
You would lose that bet. F-35s are specifically hardened against EMP and have been tested to MIL-STD-2169B. They have also been hit by lightning in the real world.
There are books and books about overly complex and over-designed US military technology going all the way back to Vietnam where our fighter-bombers, armed with the best jammers and most sophisticated technology available to us at the time were being shot down with regularity by weapon systems that amounted to a rocket on a stick.
The name of the game today is see and shoot the other guy before they can see or shoot you. This requires technology not sticks.
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And despite being a "socialist" republic for a very long time, it very much has distinct class divides. Having a kleptocracy in charge just makes the divides deeper.
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> Russia is many things, but energy poor, they are not.
I think he was referring to the recent power outages in the Southern Russia.
https://crisis24.garda.com/ale... [garda.com]
ofcourse (Score:5, Insightful)
That was obvious... the issue was from Crowdstrike, pretty sure most of Russian systems run Kaspersky instead. I work in IT in public administration in an East European country, we didn't have any glitch because we don't afford Crowdstrike. Neither the hospitals. It appears only airports/airlines were hit. Honestly, looking at the Crowdstrike website, it looks like they are selling overpriced bullshit.
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1. Have incremental forever, versioning backup solution that is extremely robust and for the love of god: Make it out-of-band managed! We use IBM Tivoli, with a massive disk and massive tape library. The entire backup system is independent. It is not connected to the network in anyway, there is a proxy server that is dual homed to read the server and desktop data, and send that to backup. It is incremental fore
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Everything you just typed makes WAY to much sense and it sounds like it cost money. PHBs HATE THAT!
It also sounds like a very sound way to ensure you can recover from most any incident.
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All of that makes sense. IBM Tivoli, as in TSM/ADSM/Spectrum Protect? I'd probably say that is one of the more bulletproof solutions around, but need to make sure the tape database is backed up. A `dsmc incremental` pretty much backs up a machine quickly.
My only issue with incremental forever style is that if there is bit rot on the first round of non-changing files months or years down the line. Having an occasional full backup, even if it is deduplicated, ensures that the data has been checked somehow
Re:ofcourse (Score:5, Interesting)
all infosec products are over priced bullshit.
Most of them actually break stuff that should work and you would want to have working if you understood why it was there in the first place. A lot of them represent a whole exciting new attack surface. Many (maybe most) are heaps of shovelware scripts built on legacy platforms like ancient php and perl versions with shiny html/css slathered over the top like cake frosting.
Its actually really really sad - what they get away with.
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Ideally InfoSec stuff should be part of the OS. For example, we all slap AV on Linux because it is a checkbox, but how often does the AV program on a Linux box actually catch stuff? Other than maybe catching some malicious PDFs on a file server, not that much. RedHat comes with aide and rkhunter, that when enabled do a good job at vetting integrity. Turn on fa-policyd, and you have AppLocker-like functionality to limit where programs can run and even what hashes run.
Macs, similar, using GateKeeper as an
Re:ofcourse (Score:5, Informative)
I feel like a devil's advocate by saying this, but other than coming from the Kremlin, Kaspersky was a solid product. It is definitely something that was either on par, or above the average AV/EDR/XDR/MDR program, and were able to deal with zero day threats fairly effectively.
Re:ofcourse (Score:4, Informative)
I used Kaspersky years ago on every Windows machine in a small company. It never caused problems. It prevented a bunch of problems. It was a solid product.
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Yay! (Score:5, Funny)
Other "Unscathed" countries include: North Korea, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Sudan, Yemen.
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Maybe we should un-sanction them now that Microsoft has been weaponized.
Time to scathe (Score:3)
Now Russia needs to be well and truly scathed.
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Losing 560,000 people killed, wounded, missing, or captured in two years is a good start. Having its Black Sea fleet scurry away after one third of its ships are sunk or damaged and rendered impotent is just icing on the cake.
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It's a start.
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But when the military strategy is a near endless supply of cannon fodder...
If Russia is immune... (Score:1)
The obvious question is was it the cause of this
I know that the obvious cause was Microsoft. We need to know what vulnerability was activated this morning!
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The vulnerability is called the US DOJ..
Microsoft wanted to pretty much end thirdparty AV/EDR as thing and not even expose the kernel hooks/interfaces to enabled. They should have Windows would be more secure and more stable for it - had they just said. Its going to be Defender from here on out and that is it.
CS and all the other EDR shovelware out there should not exist today.
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Except that Microsoft regularly screws up as well. I'd trust a third party over Microsoft's solutions any day, based upon history.
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There was no vulnerability.
Users - corporate users - purchased and deployed third party security software for their Windows based systems. This security software works by hooking deep into the kernel so it can monitor and intercept possible malware activity.
That security software received an update that was automatically pushed to and install in thousands upon thousands of machines with this software installed. Unfortunately a bug in that kernel-level code that caused these systems to bluescreen on bootup.
N
Good job! (Score:5, Funny)
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What nonsense, they're just growing business into asia where half the human race lives and people don't care about a war in Europe.
Russian economy is doing better than USA's according to the IMF, has been for a few years. Rather hilarious and probably a statement of the ineptness of USA policy makers.
Sure, Russia is run by one of the mafias there, the ex-KGB thugs; they're evil and twisted. But, smarter (wilier? craftier?) than our dumb-asses.
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Speaking of nonsense, you do know that you're full of shit about the Russian economy right?
US per-capita GDP, 2023: $82,034
Russia per-capita GDP, 2023: $14,092
US stock exchange growth YTD: +7.89%
Russia stock exchange "growth" YTD: - 3.82%
US CPI growth (inflation), June 2024: 3.0%
Russia CPI growth (inflation), June 2024: 16.7%
US GDP growth 2023: +2.5%
Russia GDP "growth" 2023: -1.2%
US Exports, 2023: $2,019,542,000,000 (~$2,000B)
Russian Exports: 2023: $423,915,000,000 (~$424B)
Go shill for the Kremlin somewhere
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I did a search on "Russian economy is doing better than USA's according to the IMF", and all I could find on the first few pages were projections and predictions, apparently based on incomplete data from the Russian govt. Anyways, it does take a couple/three years for economic warfare to have a useful effect.
Airlines down (Score:3)
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A shitty update from an antivirus vendor has absolutely nothing to do with "the cloud" genius.
If this was resulting from moving to "the cloud" then why was every laptop at my wife's business unable to boot this morning until the bad update was deleted?
Why are some VCs now backing Trump? (Score:1)
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Because the supreme court ruled that bribes are completely legal. As long as the politician receives the gratuity after they do something favorable. Republicans have made no qualms they are open for business.
Modern business only cares about the fast short term gains. If it fucks the country several years down the line, who cares? They got paid.
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Also this presumes they were not already supporting him already which I think most of the high up VC class already was, they just were not saying it. The shooting combined with Musk's outward support has them feeling like this is the moment to open up about it. At least they are honest about it now...
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What imbecile appointed that batch of gene-defective mount-breathing degenerates? Just askin'.
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And the whole "post-facto gratuity isn't a bribe" takes on whole new meaning when you look at Trump's idea of making tips (a synonym for gratuity) tax-free.
Wouldn't want to pay taxes on your bribes, would you?
Brittle Global Market (Score:4, Insightful)
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Instead of buying western software they just pirate it now. Their self-sufficiency is an illusion, especially with the brain drain that has been happening there since Putin started his war. The only thing that prevents massive security problems for them is that likely their gangs avoid targeting computers in Russia. But we can be certain large numbers of un-patched, pirated, Windows installs are quite vulnerable in Russia. Linux is used, but Windows is just as widespread there as it is here.
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Ostensibly and officially yes I think you're right. But in reality? I don't think they can easily get rid of Windows everywhere. I don't think even the CCP can force everyone to use Linux.
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There are some things which only Microsoft has that no other company is able to come close to, for better or worse. Active Directory and Entra come to mind, just because there is no other directory solution that can scale like AD can. Ages ago, perhaps Novell, but the only real competition to AD these days is Red Hat's IdM/Free IPA.
Databases, similar. There is nothing out there that can scale on a geographic scale as well as MS SQL, DB2 or Oracle. Yes, there are ways to do active/passive or even some wi
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Agreed on both points. I have used IdM/FreeIPA authenticating thousands of machines, with only a few replicas. It works well, provided you make sure you keep your CA keys active. For what it does, it does it well. However, you can't stuff hundreds of thousands of users and millions of servers into FreeIPA, or scale to multiple forests and trees. You can have a FreeIPA domain trust an AD domain, but that is different. AD does a lot of things like scaling to millions of users with relative ease, and it
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What global IT outage? (Score:2)
The only thing I noticed was /. talking about it.
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The only thing I noticed was /. talking about it.
Clearly you're not wired enough. I remember all the effort to prevent Y2K and Y2K's got nothing on this international disturbance in the force.
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Suuuuure they were. (Score:1)
Of course to be fair they might not have been affected; after all, I don't think Crowdstrike has a version that'll run on Windows 3.1.
Before you get too comfortable . . . (Score:2)
US Air Force fighters may well be superior to Russian products, but the AK-47 is still a way better weapon than the M-16. When it comes to IT, all they need to do is send their youngest, best and brightest here to attend school (a known weakness in our system) and they can do that "Giant Leap Forward" thing Mao was always on about (and which the Chinese seem to be accomplishing quite well, now that it'
This has nothing to do with Russia, and... (Score:2)
everything to do with human folly. The only people affected by this outage are people stupid enough to use Microsoft products and then hook their machines to the internet.
It's really just that simple.
If you have a boss who is a moron and insists all his people run Windows and MS Office, and who allows those machines to access the internet, then you are working for a fool and your job will eventually be eliminated.