Put not your trust in Windows — or CrowdStrike

What do the Boll Weevil, Cavendish bananas, and the recent Windows/CrowdStrike fiasco all have in common? They’re all economic disasters that occurred because far too many people put their trust in a monoculture.

I’m serious.

Indeed, I warned you years ago about Windows when I first mentioned Mr. Boll Weevil. After the Civil War, the US South became more dependent on cotton production than ever before to make money in the region in the late 19th century. 

Then, in the mid-1890s, Boll Weevils arrived and almost destroyed the cotton crop and the South’s economy. With only one cash crop, the South was vulnerable to this one bug as it destroyed crops — and hundreds of thousands of people’s livelihoods.

Today, the banana you get for breakfast every morning is in danger. Almost half of the bananas in your grocery store are Cavendish bananas, which are being devastated by the Fusarium wilt. This fungal disease might well drive Cavendishs into extinction; then what will you do for your banana split??

And now, we come to Windows and the disaster that unfolded on Friday. (This time,Microsoft’s poor security wasn’t to blame for the problem for once.) The proximate “credit” for the ongoing mess goes to CrowdStrike, which released a truly awful security update to its Falcon Sensor program, which scans Windows computers for intrusions and signs of hacking. 

All it took was a single faulty content update — not really even code — to fry Windows computers from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Just as bad, undoing the problem requires manual fixes to every computer, PC by PC. IT staffers will be up to all hours over the weekend and beyond deleting the fouled-up data file and the system reference that called it. (Those overworked IT folks will be happy learn the CEO has apologized.)

Why was the update so awful? Why did it cause hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of PCs around the world to crash and get locked into endless reboot loops? Because just like cotton and Cavendish bananas, we depend all too much on a single product: Windows.

I told you so; let me reiterate: “Windows bad, Linux good.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that, according to the folks at QR Code Generator, “Analysis of Google search data has revealed that online searches for “Microsoft alternative,” “MacOS,” “Debian,” “Ubuntu,“ and “Linux” soared by up to 290% worldwide during Microsoft’s global IT outage.”

Once more, and with feeling, I suggest you seriously consider switching your computers from Windows to Linux and contemplate moving from PCs to Macs. 

Leaving that smart-aleck attitude aside, we really do depend too much on Windows, period. If we were all using Macs or Linux, we might have encountered the same problem, but it’s less likely. Linux is more secure by design, but it’s had its security breaches, as well. It just doesn’t have them nearly as often as Windows does. 

To a lesser degree, it’s the same story with CrowdStrike. You’re unlikely to use Falcon Sensor on your home PC. Still, according to the business data analysis company  6sense.com, CrowdStrike is the No. 1 business endpoint security company with more than 3,500 customers. 

If you’re playing the “What Happened to Whom Game at home,” that’s about one in four companies that use endpoint security. These tend to be big companies. For example, my friends stuck in airports on Friday kept telling me it included most of the major airlines and all the airport flight scheduling screens. It was not a good day to fly. 

Or, to buy groceries, or get paid, or… you get the idea. I’m sure you have your own story. 

Me? Yes, I was fine with all my Linux desktops and servers…, as long as I stayed in my home/office. 

That’s the problem, you see. In this interconnected world of ours, even open-source fans like me are affected when Windows goes down. We all are.

Windows has become a single point of failure for the world’s IT infrastructure. We really must move on, not to a world where everyone uses Macs or desktop Linux, but one where we use a multitude of different operating systems.

Yes, this will be a pain. But at least this way, we won’t have days like Friday when all too much of the day-to-day technology we depend on goes down.