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.
The good news is! This is a shake out test and they’re going to update those playbooks
Sysadmins are lucky it wasn’t malware this time. Next time could be a lot worse than just a kernel driver with a crash bug.
3rd party companies really shouldn’t have access to ship out kernel drivers to millions of computers like this.
I wish you were right. I really wish you were. I don’t think you are. I’m not trying to be a contrarian but I don’t think for a large number of organizations that this is the case.
For what it’s worth I truly hope that I’m 100% incorrect and everybody learns from this bullshit but that may not be the case.
The bad news is that the next incident will be something else they haven’t thought about