An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience

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:

1. secure server share
2. server share backup at a different site
3. 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.

Seems like an argument for a heterogeneous environment, perhaps a solid and secure Linux server to host important keys like that.

I remember a few career changes ago, I was a back room kid working for an MSP.

One day I get an email to build a computer for the company, cheap as hell. Basically just enough to boot Windows 7.

I was to build it, put it online long enough to get all of the drivers installed, and then set it up in the server room, as physically far away from any network ports as possible. IIRC I was even given an IO shield that physically covered the network port for after it updated.

It was our air-gapped encryption key backup.

I feel like that shitty company was somehow prepared for this better than some of these companies today. In fact, I wonder if that computer is still running somewhere and just saved someone’s ass.

The good news is! This is a shake out test and they're going to update those playbooks

We also backup our bitlocker keys with our RMM solution for this very reason.

I get storing bitlocker keys in AD, but as a net admin and not a server admin....what do you do with the DCs keys? USB storage in a sealed envelope in a safe (or at worst, locked file cabinet drawer in the IT managers office)?

Or do people forego running bitlocker on servers since encrypting data-at-rest can be compensated by physical security in the data center?

Or DCs run on SEDs?

They also don't seem to have a process for testing updates like these...?

This seems like showing some really shitty testing practices at a ton of IT departments.

C-suites fired? That's the funniest thing I've heard yet today. They aren't getting fired - they are their own ass-coverage. How can they be to blame when all these other companies were hit as well?

I guess this is a good week for me to still be laid off.

Our administrator is understandably a little bitter about the whole experience as it has unfolded, saying, "We were forced to switch from the perfectly good ESET solution which we have used for years by our central IT team last year.

Sounds like a lot of architects and admins are going to get thrown under the bus for this one.

"Yes, we ordered you to cut costs in impossible ways, but we never told you specifically to centralize everything with a third party, that was just the only financially acceptable solution that we would approve. This is still your fault, so we're firing the entire IT department and replacing them with an AI managed by a company in Sri Lanka."

Fired? I hope they get class-actioned out of existence as a warning to anyone who skimps on QA

The overwhelming majority of webservers run Linux (it's not even close, like high 90 percent range) Edit: Upon double-checking it's more like mid-80s, but the point stands

It runs on hundreds of servers. If any of them ran windows they might be out but unless you got an account on them you'd be fine with the rest. That's the whole point of federation.

I doubt many Lemmy servers are running enterprise level antivirus.

I wonder if any Lemmy servers run on Windows without WSL. I can't think of any hard dependencies on Linux, so it should be possible.

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.

You're fucking killing it. Stay awesome.

Also gist this up pls. Thanks.

Just need the user to mash F12 during boot and select the recovery environment, possibly input WiFi credentials if not wired

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.

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

More companies need to do this, solid job security.

A word of caution, I've done this over a dozen times today and I did have one server where the bootloader was wiped after I attached it to another EC2. Always make a snapshot before doing the work just in case.

I'm the corporate world, very much Windows gets used. I know Lemmy likes a circle jerk around Linux. But in the corporate world you find various OS's for both desktop and servers. I had to support several different OS's and developed only for two. They all suck in different ways there are no clear winners.

Issue is not just on servers, but endpoints also. Servers are something that you can relatively easily fix, because they are either virtualized or physically in same location.

But endpoints you might have thousand physical locations, and IT need to visit all of them (POS, info/commercial displays, IoT sensors etc.).

My former employer had a bunch of windows servers providing remote desktops for us to access some proprietary (and often legacy) mission critical software.

Part of the security policy was that any machines in the possession of end users were assumed to be untrustworthy, so they kept the applications locked down on the servers.

On prem AD. At least for my MSP's clients. Have been pushing hard last few years to migrate to azure.

I can’t imagine how much work it would be to migrate all your services onto Linux. The problem was people adopting windows in the first place.

Proxmox with windows containers is used widely

I'm in. This world desperately needs an information workers union. Someone to cover those poor fuckers in the help desk and desktop support as well as the engineers and architects that keep all of this shit running.

Those of us that aren't underpaid are treated poorly. Today is what it looks like if everybody strikes at once.

Any time is a good time to unionize

To preface, I want to see a tech workers union so, so bad.

With that said, I genuinely don't believe that most tech workers would unionize. So many of them are brainwashed into thinking that a union would dictate all salaries, would force hiring to be domestic-only, or would ensure jobs for life for incompetent people. Anyone that knows what a union does in 2024 knows that none of that has to be true. A tech union only needs to be a flat fee every month, guaranteed access to a lawyer with experience in your cases/employer, and the opportunity to strike when a company oversteps. It's only beneficial.

Even if you could get hundreds of thousands of signatories, the recent layoffs have shown that tech companies at the highest level would gladly fire a sizable number of employees if it meant stamping out a union. As someone that has conducted interviews in big tech, the sheer numbers at peak of people that had applied for some roles was higher than the number of active employees in the whole company. In theory, Google could terminate everyone and replace them with brand-new workers in a few months. It would be a fucking mess, but it (in theory) shows that if a Google or Apple decided that it wanted no part of unions they could just dig into their fungible talent pool, fire a ton of people, promote people that stayed, and fill roles with foreign or under-trained talent.

I know people at big tech companies that work on client engineering, where this downtime has huge implications. Naturally, they've called a sev1, but instead of dedicating resources to fixing these issues the teams are basically bullied into working insane hours to manually patch while clients scream at them. One dude worked 36 hours straight because his manager outright told him "you can sleep when this is fixed", as if he's responsible for CloudStrike...

Companies won't learn. It's always a calculated risk, and much of the fallout of that risk lies with the workers.

Oh sweet summer child.

Might be hard to do. Crowdstrike release several updates per day to the channel files to match changes in adversarial behaviour. In this case, BCP and backup are what need to be done.

... So your point was that it would have been better if everything went down?

There are plentiful reasons why deployments are done in parts, and I'm guessing that after today strategies will change to apply updates in groups to avoid everything going down.

Also, dear God, stop using windows as a server, or even a client for that matter. If you're paying actual money to get this shit then the results are on you.

Because that's where filesystem access lives? AV wouldn't do very much good if it could only run from userspace.

Because the windows OS is inherently insecure with lots of permission elevation opportunities.