Last Tuesday, loads of Linux users—many running packages released as early as this year—started reporting their devices were failing to boot. Instead, they received a cryptic error message that included the phrase: “Something has gone seriously wrong.”
The cause: an update Microsoft issued as part of its monthly patch release. It was intended to close a 2-year-old vulnerability in GRUB, an open source boot loader used to start up many Linux devices. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 8.6 out of 10, made it possible for hackers to bypass secure boot, the industry standard for ensuring that devices running Windows or other operating systems don’t load malicious firmware or software during the bootup process. CVE-2022-2601 was discovered in 2022, but for unclear reasons, Microsoft patched it only last Tuesday.
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The reports indicate that multiple distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Puppy Linux, are all affected. Microsoft has yet to acknowledge the error publicly, explain how it wasn’t detected during testing, or provide technical guidance to those affected. Company representatives didn’t respond to an email seeking answers.
So, no booting into Windows until this is fixed then? Fine by me. Hell, might actually make me uninstall it completely and free some disk space…
Well… It’s the opposite… People affected by this issue could not boot Linux…
Right, but you have to boot into Windows first to even get the update in the first place…
But if you don’t boot Windows first you’ll not be affected by this issue. So my statement is correct
That’s… What the person you replied to said in the first place.
I just tried installing this patch tonight on my windows drive - not because I use windows, just to… you know… keep it updated and secure I guess.
It literally won’t even install. It just fails out every time. Whatever. Microsoft releases so many bad patches lately. WTH are they even doing over there? Windows used to be king and they’ve been screwing it up since 8 came out.
Microsoft fired its entire QA team 10 years ago, and shifted the responsibility for testing onto developers. They also got rid of their dedicated hardware lab where software would be tested on many different hardware combinations.
I have worked in two companies that made the same move of firing QA, and in both the quality of the released software took a marked dive. (In neither company did senior management admit that what everyone warned them would be a mistake was a mistake. Instead they blamed developers.)
These days Microsoft’s testing team is whichever users receive each update first. They rely on users and telemetry to do what should be the job of dedicated testers.
I’m confused - why is Microsoft trying to - or expected to, by the article authors - patch a vulnerability in GRUB?
It was supposed to patch Secure Boot, not demolish GRUB.
That’s why it’s a problem.
It was a Windows vulnerability that allowed an exploit box GRUB
Maybe its finally time to get rid of my dual boot. I haven’t used the windows side in like half a year…
I was shocked how little I need Windows. I went dual boot install but just… never booted Windows again. My games work. I’m happy. Why should I boot Windows?
Really I should just remove Windows but I’m lazy.
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“secure” boot, the industry standard for ensuring that devices don’t run software other than Windows during the bootup process
FTFY
CVE-2022-2601 was discovered in 2022, but for unclear reasons, Microsoft patched it only last Tuesday.
I respect their journalistic integrity for not speculating, but it was definitely because the NSA was exploiting it.
Ehhh that’s likely enough, but Microsoft is also just shit at fixing things
That’s what they want you to believe.
No, they really are. No doubt they do plenty of stuff at the behest of the NSA, but they are also a deeply disfunctional company with conflicts between departments and bare minimum funding for security, since it’s seen as a cost centre
I hate to break it to you but why would the NSA need a security hole in secure boot. They already have all your data from Windows plus Microsoft has the decryption keys.
Because some users are putting that data on Linux. So they want Linux to be killed.
They can’t change grub. But they sure as hell can convince micro$org to search for and nuke it.
Of course no idea if this happened. Just answering why they would might want to.
So all afected people were potential targets?
No, intelligence exploits will sometimes affect the majority of computers on a continent
Has SecureBoot ever accomplished anything vaguely resembling security?
Yeah, it made installing Linux more difficult, so it actually lowered computer security by pushing you to use windows
Securing proprietary hardware against peeps installing alt OSes
This sort of ridiculousness is why I got two seperate drives (needed the extra space anyways) and choose which one to boot from the mobo EFI menu.
Yep, I don’t even fuck with grub since that has fucked me over in the past too, I just go into the fucking bios and select it manually lmao
I use Debian and I also was affected by this Windows update. I was able to boot by disabling secure boot. I also found this option that apparently fixes the problem by changing the sbat policy using mokutil. But I haven’t tried it out yet. Has anyone got any luck with something else besides disabling secure boot?
I get to dual boot at work (I run mint btw) and the only reason I ever boot into windows every week or three is to make sure it doesn’t get so out of date that it gets booted from the network.
I guess it’s time to stop that shit! Having windows available is not worth the risk of messing up my work machine. Hell I’m tempted to nuke that windows partition and double the size of my /home partition!
Though I will give Microsoft credit that m365 stuff, including video calls in Teams, work great using the web versions in Firefox. That’s even with the security and privacy stuff cranked up. I only white listed those sites for cookies and local storage for convenience.
booting into windows?
So glad I recently removed Windows from my former dual boot system completely. Was sick of getting errors during Linux boot up after running Windows for that one piece of software I couldn’t get to work in Wine or Bottles. The culprit I assumed was Windows updates, which I attempted to disable through the registry on several occasions. It would work for a short period and then Microsoft, in all their wisdom, would just reenable updates because clearly they know better than I what I want my system to do. The last time it happened was the final straw for me when I wanted to boot into Windows briefly only to be left waiting half an hour for Windows to apply updates on shutdown. Pissed me off so much I killed the power mid-update, booted up a live partition tool and wiped Windows off my system completely (updating the grub to remove dual boot). That’s when I discovered that not properly shutting down Windows would mark my other drives dirty and make them read only. To fix this I ended up having to insert Windows installation media and pretend like I wanted to reinstall Windows 10 again. Once it got to the stage when it was about to write to the drive I cancelled the installation and rebooted back into Linux. Voilà! Could write to my drives again. To hell with Windows. I’d rather live without that one piece of software and have my system do what I want it to do rather than it second guess me and disregard my instructions. This whole automatic update thing really boiled my piss. At least with Linux I can choose to apply updates when it’s convenient for me to do so.
I have two pieces of software I cannot live without, to the point that I would rewrite them for Linux if it came to that. Running Windows as a VM using Virtual Box has been a nice experience so far. (Given that both software are not CPU nor GPU heavy and could run on a tree if need be.)
What two pieces of software, if you don’t mind sharing?
I ask because a relative who is a software developer could somehow barely finally leave windows, because of WinSCP, which is, afaik, a GUI for secure copy commands. Why rsync or sftp commands cannot be enough for a software developer without WinSCP was beyond me. But perhaps there is something I don’t know about each of these pieces of software.
Y’all, help a dummy out. I dual boot windows and Fedora. I only keep windows around for a very few college classes that require for screenwriting software. I have not booted into windows in months. I have a screenwriting class coming up in a week.
How worried should I be? I am not great with computers, I run fedora mostly because I support the philosophy of Linux, less for the techy stuff. Please advice, Linux people. I’m scurred.
Does that screenwriting software require a lot of performance? You might opt to install Windows into a virtual machine, as described here: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-setup-windows-10-virtual-machine-linux
Essentially you’re using some software to emulate a computer inside your computer that can run any operating system you want. It doesn’t need to touch your actual operating system installation, you can treat it as just another program. For your use case that sounds appropriate; you occasionally need to run specific software that has low system requirements. This way you can do that without risking Microsoft borking your Linux machine any time it feels like it.
I’d imagine it requires about as much as a word processor, since that’s basically what it is. A word processor with a specialized template and some nifty autofill options. Again, dummy here. If I’m running a virtual machine, can I create a file in it that is saved to my actual machine, or would I need to, like, email it to myself using the virtual windows os?
What do you use? Maybe there is a Linux alternative to that so you don’t have to bother with a VM.
When I was still dual-booting Windows and Linux, I found that “raw disk” mode virtual machines worked wonders. I used VirtualBox, so you’d want a guide somewhat like this: https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-physical-harddisk-in-virtual-box - other VM solutions are available, which don’t require you to accept an agreement with Oracle.
Essentially, rather than setting aside a file on disk as your VM’s disk, you can set aside a whole existing disk. That can be a disk that already has Windows installed on it, it doesn’t erase what you have. Then you can start Windows in a VM and let it do its updates - since it can’t see the bootloader from within the VM, it can’t fuck it up. You can run any software that doesn’t have particularly high graphics requirement, too.
I was also able to just “restart in Windows” if I wanted full performance for a game or something like that, but since Linux has gotten very good indeed at running games, that became less and less necessary until one day I just erased my Windows partition to recover the space.
And probably disable quick boot as I’m guessing the kernel is going to get pissed when you suddenly switch between virtualization and native
windows update can and will always find your dual boot eventually and break it
I got around that by having two EFI partitions, grub linux partition is loaded always at boot and it chainloads to the Windows EFI boot partition if I choose Windows. Windows does not know another partiton exists.
