#*mcafee

[gamer2002]

[littlethingsmart]

(source)

[horseracingweekly]

McAfee, the half-brother to Kentucky Oaks winner and Breeders' Cup Distaff winner Thorpedo Anna , won on debut last week at Churchill Downs.

Can we expect big things in the future from the 2-year-old son of Cloud Computing?

📷 Coady Media

(i)

[agapi-kalyptei]

crowdstrike hot take 5: so who was incompetent, really?

OK so it's the first Monday after the incident. CrowdStrike (CS) is being tight-lipped about the actual cause of the incident, which Microsoft estimates to have affected 8.5 million devices.

Here's an unconfirmed rumor: CS has been firing a lot of QA people and replacing them with AI. I will not base this post on that rumor. But...

Here's a fact: wikipedia listed 8429 CS employees as of April 2024. Now the updated page says they have 7925 employees in their "Fiscal Year 2024".

Anyway. Here's a semi-technical video if you want to catch up on what bluescreen and kernel-mode drivers are in the contexts of the CS incident by a former microsoft engineer. He also briefly mentions WHQL certification - a quality assurance option provided by Microsoft for companies who want to make sure their kernel drivers are top-notch.

Now conceptually, there are two types of updates - updates to a software itself, and a definition update. For a videogame, the software update would be a new feature or bugfixes, and content update would add a new map or textures or something. (Realistically they come hand in hand anyway.) For an antivirus/antimalware, a definition update is basically a list of red flags - a custom format file that instructs the main software on how to find threats.

The video mentions an important thing about the faulty update: while many people say "actually it wasn't a software update that broke it, it was a definition file", it seems that CS Falcon downloads an update file and executes code inside that file - thus avoiding the lengthy re-certification by Microsoft while effectively updating the software.

Some background: On audits in software

A lot of software development is unregulated. You can make a website, deploy it, and whether you post puppy pictures or promote terrorism, there's no one reviewing and approving your change. Laws still apply - even the puppy pictures can be problematic if they include humans who did not consent to have their photos taken and published - but no one's stopping you immediately from publishing them.

And a lot of software development IS regulated - you cannot make software for cars without certifications, you cannot use certain programming languages when developing software for spaceships or MRIs. Many industries like online casinos are regulated - IF you want to operate legally in most countries, you need a license, and you need to implement certain features ("responsible gaming"), and you must submit the actual source code for reviews.

This varies country by country (and state by state, in USA, Canada, etc) and can mean things like "you pay $200 for each change you want to put to production*", or it can mean "you have to pay $40'000 if you make a lot of changes and want to get re-certified".

*production means "web servers or software that goes to end customers", as opposed to "dev environment", "developer's laptop", "QA environment" or "staging" or "test machines", "test VMs" or any of the other hundreds way to test things before they go live.

The certification, and regular audits, involves several things:

Testing the software from user's perspective

Validating the transactions are reported correctly (so that you're not avoiding taxes)

Checking for the user-protecting features, like being able to set a monthly limit on depositing money, etc

Checking the source code to make sure customers are not being ripped off

Validating security and permissions, so a janitor can't download or delete production databases

Validating that you have the work process that you said you would - that you have Jira (or similar) tickets for everything that gets done and put to production, etc, and

...that you have Quality Assurance process in place, and that every change that goes to production is tested and approved

You can see why I highlighted the last point, right.

Now, to my knowledge, security software doesn't have its own set of legal requirements - if I want to develop an antivirus, I don't need a special permission from my government, I can write code, not test it at all, and start selling it for, idk for example $185 per machine it gets deployed to.

And here's the thing - while there certainly is a level of corruption / nepotism / favoritism in the IT industry, I don't think CloudStrike became one of the biggest IT security providers in the world just by sweet talking companies. While there isn't any legal regulation, companies do choose carefully before investing into 3rd party solutions that drastically affect their whole IT. What I mean, CloudStrike probably wasn't always incompetent.

(Another rumor from youtube comments: A company with ~1000 employees was apparently pressured by an insurance company to use CrowdStrike - whether it's a genuine recommendation, an "affiliate link" or just plain old bribery... I do not know.)

WHY what happened is still very baffling

See, this is what would be the process if I was running a security solutions company:

a team is assigned a task. this task is documented

the team discusses the task if it's non-trivial, and they work on it together if possible

solo developer taking the task is not ideal, but very common, since you cannot parallelize (split it between several people) some tasks

while developing, ideally the developer can test everything from start to finish on their laptop. If doing it on their laptop isn't possible, then on a virtual machine (a computer that runs only inside software, and can be more or less stored in a file, duplicated, restored to a previous version, backed up, etc, just by copying that file)

in case of automated software updates, you would have "update channels". In this case it means... like if you have a main AO3 account where you put finished things, and then you'd have another AO3 account where you only put beta fics. So in my hypothetical company, you'd have a testing update channel for each developer or each team. The team would first publish their work only on their update channel, and then a separate QA team could test only their changes.

Either way, after maybe-mostly-finishing the task, the code changes would be bundled in something called a "pull request" or "PR" or "merge request". It's basically a web page that displays what was the code before and after. This PR would be reviewed by people who have NOT worked on the change, so they can check and potentially criticize the change. This is one of the most impactful things for software quality.

Either before or after the PR, the change would go to QA. First it would be tested just in the team's update channel. If it passes and no more development is needed on it, it would go to a QA update channel that joins all recent changes across all teams.

After that, it would be released to an early access or prerelease update channel, sometimes called a canary deploy. Generally, this would be either a limited amount - maybe 100 or 1000 computers, either used internally, or semi-randomly spread across real clients, or it could be as much as 10% of all customers' computers.

THEN YOU WAIT AND SEE IF THERE ARE NO ERROR REPORTS.

Basically ALL modern software (and websites! all the cookies!) collect "metrics" - like "how often each day is this running", or "did our application crash"

you absolute MUST have graphs (monitoring - sometimes this is a part of discipline called "reliability engineering") that show visually things like the number of users online, how many customers are lagging behind with updates, how many errors are reported, how many viruses are being caught by our software. If anything goes up or down too much, it's a cause for concern. If 10% of your customers are suddenly offline after a canary deploy is out, you're shitting your pants.

ONLY after waiting for a while to see everything is okay, you can push the update to ALL clients. It is unfathomable how anyone would do that straight away, or maybe how someone could do it without proper checks, or how the wrong thing got sent to the update.

As ClownStrike is still silent about the actual cause of the issue, we can only make guesses about how much they circumvented their own Quality Assurance process to push the faulty update to millions of computers.

It gets worse

Here's the thing: CrowdStrike itself allows users to create computer groups and let them choose the update channel. You, as a business customer, can say

these 100 unimportant laptops will have the latest update

these important servers will have N-1 update (one version behind)

the rest of the company will have N-2 update (two update versions behind)

CrowdStrike has ignored those settings. According to some youtube comments, supposedly they pushed the update to "only" 25% of all devices - which is worrying to think this could have gone even worse.

Third time isn't the charm

And hey, do you know what happened two years before CrowdStrike was founded? The CEO George Kurtz was at the time, in 2010, the CTO of McAfee, the controversial / crappy security company (IMO offering one of the worst antivirus programs of all times, that was aggressively pushed through bundled OEM deals). In both 2009 and 2010 their enterprise software deleted a critical operating system file and bricked a lot of computers, possibly hundreds of thousands.

And yes, the trigger wasn't an update to the antivirus itself, but a faulty "definition update". Funny coincidence, huh.

[willcodehtmlforfood]

szamitozos emberek

erositsetek meg h nem én -nek nem kell mcafee liveSafe (tm) (including secure vpn £47.99, virus protection pledge £59.99, mcafee mobile security) osszesen £109 penzert....

(nyilvan nehany eve vettunk egy bolti gepet es nem lehetett kikerulni a sok "ingyen" szart, azt most veletlen raneztem a gepre es epp 1 honapja beutott az auto renewal... amit 60 napon belul visszaadnak)

[thejaymaniac]

somewhere out there, is someone who works for or has worked for McAfee antivirus. this person made the decision, to never stop prompting windows users to buy their shitty service with shitty popups that never go away.

im going to find them and defenestrate their ass from an eleven story building.

call that shit windows 11. I hate it here

[chrissysky]

what are the chances

[slicedcheesegremlin]

Rule

[emeraldspiral]

I just saw a McAfee ad and I am shocked it's pronounced Mac-uh-fee and not Mic-affy.

[aethericfist]

McAfee more like McAffe (German for McMonkey)

I cancelled my subscription because McAfee regularly made ad-popups just pop up, to A PAYING CUSTOMER. So I cancelled and what do I get? I window that takes up 1/6 of my monitor.

Fuck you McAfee.

[maxpctools]

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[kayleafeon]

he's the complete opposite of john mcafee in what he stands for and is still equally insane in the stuff he's done

alex hirsch truly is like. the guy ever. he created one of if not the most renowned and successful disney tva shows. he clowns on said network. he won his high school’s bird calling contest. he hates trump and is always advocating for people to vote. also prank calls republican/maga hotlines and was on the washington post for such. he voices half the cast of his own show and does a deranged mickey mouse voice he uses for like two separate shows. he owns a giant taxidermy buffalo. he and his sister were on an international improv team in high school. disney censored practically all queer themes in his show and now he has a nyt best seller (and created the website plus recent interviews ect ect) that imply there was something going on between that fuck ass triangle and ford. a straight man creating good old man yaoi. creates the craziest rabbit holes to send the fandom down probably primarily fueled by adhd and coffee. he probably has his flannel sewn to his body atp and has thousands of sticky hands on the wall in his house. i could go on but he’s just truly such a interesting guy

[dissident777]

John McAfee on Encrypted Messaging and Email

[anmolsmsblog]

Dell [Smartchoice]15 Thin & Light Laptop, Intel Core i5-1235U Processor, 8GB, 512GB, 15.6" (39.62cm) FHD 120Hz 250 nits Display, Intel UHD Graphics Win 11 + MSO'21 + 15 Month McAfee, Titan Grey,1.69kg

Price: (as of – Details) From the manufacturer Processor: i5-1235U (up to 4.40 GHz, 12MB, 10 Cores)RAM: 8 GB: 1 x 8 GB, DDR4, 2666 MT/s & Storage: 512GB SSDGraphics: Intel UHD Graphics & Display: 15.6″ FHD WVA AG 120Hz 250 nits Narrow BorderKeyboard: Standard KeyboardPorts: 2 USB 3.2 Gen 1 Ports, 1 USB 2.0 Port, 1 Headset Jack, 1 HDMI 1.4 Port, 1 SD 3.0 Card Slot, 1 Flip-Down RJ-45 port��

[neververy4]

It’s usually already on your computer as a bloatware package, if you buy your device from an OEM provider (Dell, Lenovo, HP, ASUS, Acer, etc.), so the first thing people usually have to do is uninstall it

I don’t know what McAfee still gets from being included after all these years. It’s been outed as a bad program for over a decade, why do OEM’s still have it installed by default? There’s a whole history behind this bad software and the founder of it by the way, for those who love that kind of tidbit