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Comment by inejge | Hacker News Reader

The glaring question is how and why it was rolled out everywhere all at once?

Because the point of these updates is to be rolled out quickly and globally. It wasn't a system/driver update, but a data file update: think antivirus signature file. (Yes, I know it can get complicated, and that AV signatures can be dynamic... not the point here.)

Why those data updates skipped validity testing at the source is another question, and one that CrowdStrike better be prepared to answer; but the tempo of redistribution can't be changed.

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A customer should be able to test an update, whether a signature file or literally any kind of update, before rolling it out to production systems. Anything else is madness. Being "vulnerable" for an extra few hours carries less risk than auto-updates (of any kind) on production systems. As we've seen here. If you can point to hard evidence to the contrary, where many companies were saved just in time because of a signature update and would have been exploited if they'd waited a few hours, I'd love to read about it. It would have to have happened on a rather large scale for all of the instances combined to have had a larger positive impact than this single instance.

But is there a need for quick global releases?

Is it realistic that there's a threat actor that will be attacking every computer on the whole planet at once?

I can understand that it's most practical to update everyone when pushing an update to protect a few actively under attack but I can also imagine policies where that isn't how it's done, while still getting urgent updates to those under attack.

Is there a need? Maybe, possibly, depends on circumstances.

Is this what people are paying CS for? Absolutely.

After this I imagine there will be an option "do you want updates immediately, or updates when released - n, or n+2, n+6, n+24, n+48 hrs?"

Given the choice I bet there's going to be surprisingly large number of orgs go "we'll take n+24hrs thanks"

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