Damn, the end of security through obscurity on my Linux box?
Did I miss the bit where they said how it was delivered?
Seems it’s exploiting vulnerabilities in some software called “Ivanti Connect Secure VPN”, so unless you’re running that, you’re safe I guess. Says in the past they used vulnerabilities in “Qlik Sense” and Adobe “Magento”. Never heard of any of those, but I guess maybe some businesses use them?
ITT people who don’t understand the difference between “privacy” VPNs pitched by influencers and corporate remote access VPN.
This is the latter. Ivanti bought Pulse a few years back. Pulse, iirc, spun out of Juniper and Netscreen.
Ivanti is a huge name in enterprise management. They make LANdesk which has been one of the most widely deployed enterprise endpoint management tools.
Juniper is one of the biggest names in enterprise and service-provider networks.
Ivanti Connect Secure VPN
So its spreading via a closed source VPN software. Why should you even use that when there is great VPN software available on Linux which works reliable for decades?
Well of course you miss zero trust connections, multi-cloud readiness, award‑winning security and proven secure corporate access …
I pay for ProtonVPN, and I still run my traffic through OpenVPN.
Hate to victim blame, but unless you’re going to audit every line of code yourself, don’t use obscure software.
As TonyTonyChopper this thread said, sometimes that obscure software is what you are required to use in your institution, or they don’t offer support for anything else.
To be fair you should be using wire guard then. Because multiple of the largest and most well-known security auditing firms in the world have said that openvpn is impossible to truly audit. It’s too large, you can audit individual parts of it, and you can audit individual interactions between parts. But it’s not possible to fully audit.
Meanwhile wireguard is quite small so it can be fairly easily audited by a small team and has been multiple times
As much as I loathe m$, the one thing they got right was forcing casual users (windows home) to install security updates as top priority, whether they like it or not. I know we all hate on windows, and rightly so, but that policy does nullify this particular vector and that is great for the consumer-level users.
(… for the sake of argument lets just pretend windows doesnt have 10,000 other vulns the malware devs can just exploit instead)
I mean, I don’t think I would mind forced updates if they didn’t take so damned long and fail half the time. And then, just when you think you’ve finished installing all updates, you reboot and there’s more updates! Why can’t they just install it all at once?
Plus, after each major update, Microsoft wastes your time by advertising to you about Edge, Office 365, and OneDrive before they even let you get back into the desktop.
Forced security updates is addressing a symptom but not addressing the root cause, which is that the Windows update process is just painful for a myriad of reasons. In Linux, I run one command, wait 5 minutes, reboot, and I am back to work.
I legitimately haven’t had a windows update take more than 5 minutes during the reboot phase for years. Most of the time it’s about 30 seconds.
Same here. I don’t know what people that have all these issues are doing, but none of my systems or those of my friends and family have these issues.
We also aren’t fucking around with the various random guides to “debloat”, mess with telemetry, eetc. however, so I can only assume that it’s things in those guides and programs that cause issues. For the people with enough technical knowledge to look for the guides but not enough knowledge to know what they do, or care enough to find out.
The longest update I’ve had took about 15 minutes. My system never restarts in the middle of use to install updates, with the only exception when I was actively hitting the delay button for several days to see if I could force it to. And it finally did, after several days of it asking and me telling it no, and it still gave me a countdown to save my work. It did not randomly restart while in use without warning.
Programs like candy crush, that had install links that were preinstalled (it’s not the full game, just a link to install it) I uninstalled like any regular app and they never returned. I use my system like a regular user, not mucking about blindly in the registry, and never run into these weird issues people complain about. I block telemetry I don’t want at the network level. The OS never knows and I don’t have to blindly trust random guides telling me to mess with things that aren’t intended to be messed with. The OS seems to work just fine with telemetry connections working but failing to connect, as would be expected and tested by MS. People messing with those things manually is not something they’d likely spend much, if any, time on testing.
From my experience, many so-called “power user” complaints are caused by the user doing things they don’t understand, outside of what would be expected and tested.
The longest update I’ve had took about 15 minutes.
Asking someone to take 15 minutes out of their work time to do updates is exactly why people DON’T want to update. Even 15 minutes is insane. That’s a whole standup meeting, that’s a whole presentation, that’s work disruption for a bunch of people.
Linux updates in a minute. That’s the kind of performance we SHOULD be expecting in the modern age and that Microsoft refuses to deliver.
I’m sorry but as much as I hate Windows, the only updates that take this long are feature updates that happen twice a year. The vast majority of windows updates take less than a minute for me and don’t require a restart. Even the ones that do finish in under 5 mins
Not true. Cumulative updates also take a while, so do the .NET runtimes. Maybe you have a system with a super fast NVMe drive and a new CPU so you don’t realize it, but other OSes can do much more with much less powerful hardware.
So don’t update in the middle of your work day. It literally pops up in the corner saying it needs a restart after installing what it can while the system is running, and you can delay it. It only forces a restart when you’ve delayed it several times already over multiple days.
Most updates on my system are handled overnight, outside the active hours I’ve set in the settings. So it doesn’t affect my usage at all. I get on in the morning with a freshly updated system, and if I left apps open overnight, they are reopened where I left off. I only see updates when I tell it to update manually.
I can see you don’t use a laptop.
The problem with windows is it’s one time it’s installing ads that you have to disable for apps, a different time it’s installing ads by re-enabling Cortana and forcing local searches over the web, a different time it’s adding ads by installing a bullshit weather app, a different time it’s adding ads with a bullshit news app, a different time it’s reverting all your settings limiting
spywaretelemetry, a different time…It’s not one thing repeatedly. But it’s constantly whack a mole to figure out how to disable the newest hostile anti-feature it installed without your consent.
Yeah, I have never had Windows 11 undo anything I’ve changed or reinstall anything I have uninstalled.
You all are doing something that is causing these issues.
Every single one of those things happened on Windows 10. No, I absolutely did not do anything to instigate it.
Microsoft is malicious and has an extremely long history of being shitbags adding aggressively invasive features for the sole purpose of spyware and advertising.
I legitimately haven’t had a windows update take more than 5 minutes during the reboot phase for years.
I wasn’t just talking about the reboot phase…
Downloading gigabytes worth of updates, waiting for them to install, rebooting, see more updates, reboot again takes WAY more than 5 minutes.
But why are you paying attention to a process that a) doesn’t need supervision and b) is done automatically in the background? It’s such a weird thing to complain about.
Not to mention, the vast majority of windows updates are tiny. The only large updates are the yearly major updates. If you’ve got multi gig downloads happening even weekly, you might want to look into what’s wrong with your system.
