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.
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.
You’re fucking killing it. Stay awesome.
Also gist this up pls. Thanks.
I wish it was more shareable, but it’s also not as magic as it sounds.
Fundamentally it’s just a Linux install with some heavy customizations so that it does one thing only: boot Linux, and just enough prompts to get it online so that the VPN works, and download the root image into RAM that it boots into so I can SSH into the box, and then a bunch of Linux tools for me to use so I can reimage from there, or run a QEMU with the physical disk passed through so I can VNC into an install even if it BSOD.
It’s a Linux UKI (combined kernel+initramfs into a simple EFI file the firmware can boot directly without a bootloader), but you can just as easily get away with a hidden Debian install or whatever. Can even be a second Windows install if that’s your thing. The reason I went this particular route is I don’t have to update it since it downloads it on the fly, much like the Mac recovery. And it runs entirely in RAM afrerwards so I can safely do whatever is needed with the disk.
I dream of working somewhere where this kind of effort is appreciated enough to motivate me to put in the effort of actually doing it.
I wish too, it’s only deployed for family and family businesses because I’m a couple thousand miles away from them. I cobbled this together for the explicit purpose of being able to reinstall Windows remotely. It works wonderfully though!
My real job is DevOps and 100% Linux, and most of the cloud servers are disposable and can be simply be rebuilt at the push of a button in some dashboard.
Yeah, that sounds even more magic! I hope you’re appreciated…
“It’s not as magic as it sounds”, he says as my eyes gloss over on the first sentence.
In theory that sounds great, now just do it 1000+ times while your phone is ringing off the hook and you’re working with some of the most tech illiterate people in your org.
I’m pressing F and 1 and 2, but nothings happening!
Still better than guiding the user to safe mode with command prompt and bitlocker recovery keys themselves.
Sounds like a nightmare for security, and a dream for attackers.
More companies need to do this, solid job security.
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.