An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience
An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience
CrowdStrike? More like Clownstrike! Amirite?
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.
"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."
backup your backups. I mean, I don't work the IT side and i'm a developer but...isn't it common sense to like not 100% use something to store keys where you potentially can't log into? For me if I have a key that I need to use to decrypt something, hell even to log into discord if my 2FAs fail, I store them on a USB drive. If i'm using something and it says "you'll need a key for backups just in case" ok cool, key goes on the drive.
Also Microsoft should be getting just as much flak as Crowdstrike is right now. Bitlocker is god awful and the fact you need decryption keys for many devices to simply boot into safe is stupid. I remember when I still used win11 and I fucked something up and I discovered for the first time I needed a bitlocker code to simply get into safemode or recovery mode. I had no idea and thought it was so stupid. just to get into safe? really?
80% of our machines were hit. We were working through 9pm on Friday night running around putting in bitlocker keys and running the fix. Our organization made it worse by hiding the bitlocker keys from local administrators.
Also gotta say... way the boot sequence works, combined with the nonsense with raid/nvme drivers on some machines really made it painful.
Just a thought from experience: Be wary of any critical products and/or taking a job from a company run by an accountant. CrowdStrike CEO... accountant!
Accounting firms are an obvious exception.
lmao
Pity the administrators who dutifully kept a list of those keys on a secure server share, only to find that the server is also now showing a screen of baleful blue.
Lol, can you imagine? It empathetically hurts me even thinking of this situation. Enter that brave hero who kept the fileshare decryption key in a local keepass :D
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.
Lmao this is incredible
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.
"Most of our comms are down, most execs' laptops are in infinite bsod boot loops, engineers can't get access to credentials to servers."
N.B.: Reddit link is from the source
I hope a lot of c-suites get fired for this. But I’m pretty sure they won’t be.
If you have EC2 instances running Windows on AWS, here is a trick that works in many (not all) cases. It has recovered a few instances for us:
- Shut down the affected instance.
- Detach the boot volume.
- Move the boot volume (attach) to a working instance in the same region (us-east-1a or whatever).
- Remove the file(s) recommended by Crowdstrike:
- Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory
- Locate the file(s) matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete them (unless they have already been fixed by Crowdstrike).
- Detach and move the volume back over to original instance (attach)
- Boot original instance
Alternatively, you can restore from a snapshot prior to when the bad update went out from Crowdstrike. But that is not always ideal.
I got super lucky. got paid for my car just before the dealership systems went down, got my return flight 2 days before this shit started.
Prod update on a friday morning? Non-malicious my ass.
Yet again: Switch to Linux.