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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I don't even understand why something like clownstrike is necessary in 2024. It should be possible for the OS to be locked down to the point where it's not necessary to have an anti-virus running. And if you need some other security system because you are worried about zero day exploit from nation state threats then you should really consider your threat model because the clownstrike system is effectively a malware distribution platform. I guess its fine if you trust clownstrike and the US government but its a far from ideal situation. Clownstrike seems to have a very nice relationship with the US security state. For example they were brought in to do the hacking investigation by the DNC and provided attribution to Russia.

OS vendors should really expose some kind of interface that allows security vendors to perform these deep inspections 'safely'. I think linux has EBPF which I think some vendors have been using for providing file system monitoring and network monitoring.

Also, the SOC2/etc compliance mandates a lot of this stuff. We run most of our software on Fargate ECS where the compute is completely managed by AWS. I've been using this as an excuse as to why we can't run file monitoring and other garbage on our systems that use Fargate. I also suspect why these managed docker/managed kurbernetes systems are popular because potentially you can avoid some of the tickbox security work. We also run all of our containers with a read-only rootfilesystem so I don't even understand the threats that a file system monitoring system would be trying to remediate in our situation. Technically some kernel exploit could allow the root filesystem to be modified even if its read only or AWS employees could fuck with us but I suspect in these cases the file system monitoring could also be trivially bypassed.

I don't even understand why something like clownstrike is necessary in 2024.

Clownstrike and all the other security stuff is the triumph of the security engineers and MBA types over users and cowboy developer types. Security incidents happen. Security engineers blame users and cowboy developer types, come up with software to make computers crappier and less useful. MBAs (especially MBAs at companies making this malware) call this "best practices" and push to have them required by corporations and governments. Developers and users complain that their computers are slow and don't work, the MBAs and security engineers say 'that's how you know it's working'. Then something like this happens and the cowboy types indulge in schadenfreude.

I don't even understand why something like clownstrike is necessary in 2024.

Because, just like with DEI and other stupid corpo bullshit, business necessity has nothing to do with efficacy. You do the rituals and check the boxes because someone somewhere figures this lets the company cover its ass. Whether there was an actual threat of ass exposure to begin with doesn't even get considered.