“CrowdStrike is far from the only security firm to trigger Windows crashes with a driver update. Updates to Kaspersky and even Windows’ own built-in antivirus software Windows Defender have caused similar Blue Screen of Death crashes in years past.”
“‘People may now demand changes in this operating model,’ says Jake Williams, vice president of research and development at the cybersecurity consultancy Hunter Strategy. ‘For better or worse, CrowdStrike has just shown why pushing updates without IT intervention is unsustainable.’”
They are less of an actual computers in a sense that they are not running stuff under their owner / operator control. This would happen in Linux with much lower chances, because there are no side update channels to such a critical component of the system used there.
However, to take back what I just wrote :) - I am sure rightly motivated engineers would be able to build such a security hole into Linux too, under enough pressure from bad corporate decisions.
What do you mean “no side update channels”? There are lots of software that update outside of a distro repo and lots of software that pulls metadata from the internet that could cause an error in the parser.