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.
That’s why the 3-2-1 rule exists:
- 3 copies of everything on
- 2 different forms of media with
- 1 copy off site
For something like keys, that means:
- secure server share
- server share backup at a different site
- physical copy (either USB, printed in a safe, etc)
Any IT pro should be aware of this “rule.” Oh, and periodically test restoring from a backup to make sure the backup actually works.
We have a cron job that once a quarter files a ticket with whoever is on-call that week to test all our documented emergency access procedures to ensure they’re all working, accessible, up-to-date etc.
