This is an unpopular opinion, and I get why – people crave a scapegoat. CrowdStrike undeniably pushed a faulty update demanding a low-level fix (booting into recovery). However, this incident lays bare the fragility of corporate IT, particularly for companies entrusted with vast amounts of sensitive personal information.
Robust disaster recovery plans, including automated processes to remotely reboot and remediate thousands of machines, aren’t revolutionary. They’re basic hygiene, especially when considering the potential consequences of a breach. Yet, this incident highlights a systemic failure across many organizations. While CrowdStrike erred, the real culprit is a culture of shortcuts and misplaced priorities within corporate IT.
Too often, companies throw millions at vendor contracts, lured by flashy promises and neglecting the due diligence necessary to ensure those solutions truly fit their needs. This is exacerbated by a corporate culture where CEOs, vice presidents, and managers are often more easily swayed by vendor kickbacks, gifts, and lavish trips than by investing in innovative ideas with measurable outcomes.
This misguided approach not only results in bloated IT budgets but also leaves companies vulnerable to precisely the kind of disruptions caused by the CrowdStrike incident. When decision-makers prioritize personal gain over the long-term health and security of their IT infrastructure, it’s ultimately the customers and their data that suffer.
I’d issue IPMI or remote management commands to reboot the machines. Then I’d boot into either a Linux recovery environment (yes, Linux can unlock BitLocker-encrypted drives) or a WinPE (or Windows RE) and unlock the drives, preferably already loaded on the drives, but could have them PXE boot - just giving ideas here, but ideal DR scenario would have an environment ready to load & PXE would cause delays.
I’d either push a command or script that would then remove the update file that caused the issue & then reboots. Having planned for a scenario like this already, total time to fix would be less than 2 hours.
At my company I use a virtual desktop and it was restored from a nightly snapshot a few hours before I logged in that day (and presumably, they also applied a post-restore temp fix). This action was performed on all the virtual desktops at the entire company and took approximately 30 minutes (though, probably like 4 hours to get the approval to run that command, LOL).
It all took place before I even logged in that day. I was actually kind of impressed… We don’t usually act that fast.
Somebody give those workers that had their shit together a raise, for real.