this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
632 points (98.5% liked)

Technology

62824 readers
5232 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s
enu
technopagan
L4s
632
An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience (www.theregister.com)
submitted 7 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 82 points 7 months ago (12 children)

This is why every machine I manage has a second boot option to download a small recovery image off the Internet and phone home with a shell. And a copy of it on a cheap USB stick.

Worst case I can boot the Windows install in a VM with the real disk, do the maintenance remotely. I can reinstall the whole thing remotely. Just need the user to mash F12 during boot and select the recovery environment, possibly input WiFi credentials if not wired.

I feel like this should be standard if you have a lot of remote machines in the field.

[–] douglasg14b 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Sounds like a nightmare for security, and a dream for attackers.

More companies need to do this, solid job security.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

You can sign the whole thing, it's not like you have to turn off secure boot and just drop the user to a root shell. There's nothing to be gained from it, especially if you have physical access to the machine.

load more comments (10 replies)