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An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience (www.theregister.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

136 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

(page 3) 41 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 82 points 10 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 10 months ago (5 children)

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.

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[+] [email protected] -7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Why the fuck does an antivirus need a kernel driver

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Pretending linux privelege escalation doesn't exist... to fight something that gets root you have to be able to fight at the root level, or the root access malware can simply nuke the av from userland.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Or you could just use kernel namespaces, SELinux, Systemd sandboxing, etc. There is zero need to run in ring 0 for security reasons.

Also, privilege escalation is a lot rarer on Linux than it is on Windows.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 193 points 10 months ago (21 children)

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.

Someone never tested their DR plans, if they even have them. Generally locking your keys inside the car is not a good idea.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I hope that system doesn't have any dependencies on the systems it's protecting (auth, mfa).

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

The bad news is that the next incident will be something else they haven't thought about

[–] [email protected] 40 points 10 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

At least no mission critical services were hit, because nobody would run mission critical services in Windows, right?
..
RIGHT??

[–] [email protected] 47 points 10 months ago

[–] [email protected] 117 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 78 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Stupid argument though, honestly just chance that crowdstrike was the vendor to shit the bed. Might aswell have been set. You should still have procedures for this

[–] [email protected] 86 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 79 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 110 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Lemmy appears to be weathering the storm quite well.....

..probably runs on linux

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 97 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 68 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (12 children)

Sounds like the best time to unionize

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Any time is a good time to unionize

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[–] [email protected] 201 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 129 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 55 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Linux can shit the bed too. You need to maintain a physical copy.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

Hey Ralph can you get that post-it from the bottom of your keyboard?

[–] [email protected] 52 points 10 months ago

Their point is not that linux can't fail, it's that a mix of windows and linux is better than just one. That's what "heterogeneous environment" means.

You should think of your network environment like an ecosystem; monocultures are vulnerable to systemic failure. Diverse ecosystems are more resilient.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sure but the chances of your Windows and Linux machines shitting the bed at the same time is less than if everything is running Windows. It's exactly the same reason you keep a physical copy (which after all can break/burn down etc.) - more baskets to spread your eggs across.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Very few businesses are going to spend the money running redundant infrastructure on two different operating systems. Most of them won't even spend the money on a proper DR plan.