this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike pushed an update that caused millions of Windows computers to enter recovery mode, triggering the blue screen of death. Learn ...

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

Are there really a billion systems in the world that run Crowdstrike? That seems implausible. Is it just hyperbole?

[–] MeekerThanBeaker 44 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Probably includes a bunch of virtual machines.

[–] Joelk111 21 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, our VMs completely died at work. Has to set up temporary stuff on hardware we had laying around today. Was kinda fun, but stressful haha.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Could you just revert VMs to a snapshot before the update? Or do you not take periodic snapshots? You could probably also mount the VM's drive on the host and delete the relevant file that way.

[–] EncryptKeeper 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yes you can just go into safe mode on an affected machine and delete the offending file. The problem is it took a couple hours before that resolution was found, and it has to be done by hand on every VM. I can’t just run an Ansible playbook against hundreds of non-booted VMs. Then you have to consider in the case of servers, there might be a specific start up order, certain things might have to be started before other things and further fixing might be required given that every VM hard crashed. At the minimum it took many companies 6-12 hours to get back up and running and on many more it could take days.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Makes sense - thanks for the details.

[–] Joelk111 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Yeah, like the other person said, corporate IT is responsible for that stuff. I guess they're working through the weekend to try to get it fixed.

[–] UnsavoryMollusk 1 points 3 months ago

This is assuming you have those access. Some companies can sometimes be a bit .... Stupid.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I doubt it's too much of a stretch, since even here in australia, we've had multiple airlines, news stations, banks, supermarkets and many others, including the aluminium extrusion business my father works at, all go down, scale this do hundreds of countries with populations tenfold of ours, it puts it into perspective that there may even be more than a billion machines affected

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Despite how it may seem on Lemmy, most people have not yet actually switched to Linux. This stat is legit.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I know that Windows is everywhere, I just don't know the percentage of Windows computers that run Crowdstrike.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Keep in mind, it's not just clients, but servers too. A friend of mine works for a decently sized company that has about 1600 (virtual) servers internationally. And yes, all of them were affected.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You do realize that linux is something like 80% of servers. Which also well out number personal machines. If you include android linux is easily the most used os on the planet.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It’s 80% of web servers but not 80% of ALL servers.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago

if the question is which os has the most distinct running copies then yeah its linux.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Sounds pretty plausible to me. An organization doesn’t have to be very big to get into the hundreds or thousands of devices on a network when you account for servers and VM.

A company with 40 employees all accessing and RDS server using a company laptop is looking at 85+ devices already