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An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience (www.theregister.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

136 comments fedilink hide all child comments

IT administrators are struggling to deal with the ongoing fallout from the faulty CrowdStrike update. One spoke to The Register to share what it is like at the coalface.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the administrator, who is responsible for a fleet of devices, many of which are used within warehouses, told us: "It is very disturbing that a single AV update can take down more machines than a global denial of service attack. I know some businesses that have hundreds of machines down. For me, it was about 25 percent of our PCs and 10 percent of servers."

He isn't alone. An administrator on Reddit said 40 percent of servers were affected, along with 70 percent of client computers stuck in a bootloop, or approximately 1,000 endpoints.

Sadly, for our administrator, things are less than ideal.

Another Redditor posted: "They sent us a patch but it required we boot into safe mode.

"We can't boot into safe mode because our BitLocker keys are stored inside of a service that we can't login to because our AD is down.

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[–] ripcord 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

They also don't seem to have a process for testing updates like these...?

This seems like showing some really shitty testing practices at a ton of IT departments.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Apparently from what I was reading these are forced updates from Crowdstrike, you don't have a choice.

[–] ripcord 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've heard differently. But if it's true, that should have been a non-starter for the product for exactly reasons like this. This is basic stuff.

[–] Entropywins 13 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Companies use crowdstrike so they don't need internal cybersecurity. Not having automatic updates for new cyber threats sorta defeats the purpose of outsourcing cybersecurity.

[–] hangonasecond 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Automatic updates should still have risk mitigation in place, and the outage didn't only affect small businesses with no cyber security capability. Outsourcing does not mean closing your eyes and letting the third party do whatever they want.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Outsourcing does not mean closing your eyes and letting the third party do whatever they want.

It shouldn't, but when the decisions are made by bean counters and not people with security knowledge things like this can easily (and frequently) happen.

[–] ripcord 5 points 4 months ago

Not bothering doing basic, minimal testing - and other mitigation processes - before rolling out updates is absolutely terrible policy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, the pace of attack development doesn't really give much time for testing.

[–] ripcord 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

More time that the zero time than companies appear to have invested here.

[–] TonyOstrich 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I was just thinking about something similar. I can understand wanting to get a security update as quickly as possible, but it still seems like some kind of rolling update could have mitigated something like this. When I say rolling, I mean for example split all of your customers into 24 groups and push the update once an hour to another group. If it causes a massive fuck up it's only some or most, but not all.

[–] hangonasecond 4 points 4 months ago

Heck even 30 minutes ahead for 1% of devices wouldve had a reasonable chance of catching this