Microsoft says it estimates that 8.5m computers around the world were disabled by the global IT outage.
It’s the first time a figure has been put on the incident and suggests it could be the worst cyber event in history.
The glitch came from a security company called CrowdStrike which sent out a corrupted software update to its huge number of customers.
Microsoft, which is helping customers recover said in a blog post: “We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices.”
Is there any automation available for this? Do you fix them sequentially or can you parallelize the process? How long did it take to fix 450?
Real clustermess, but curious what fixing it looks like for the boots on the ground.
Thankfully I had cached credentials and our servers aren’t bitlocker’d. Majority of the servers had iLO consoles but not all. Most of the servers are on virtual hosts so once I got the fail over cluster back, it wasn’t that hard just working my way through them. But the hardware servers without iLO required physically plugging in a monitor and keyboard to fix, which is time consuming. 10 of them took a couple hours.
I worked 11+ hours straight. No breaks or lunch. That got our production domain up and the backup system back on. The dev and test domains are probably half working. My boss was responsible for those and he’s not very efficient.
So for the most part I was able to do most of the work from my admin pc in my office.
For the majority of them, I’d use the Widows recovery menu that they were stuck at to make them boot into safe mode with network support ( in case my cached credentials weren’t up-to-date). Then start a cmd and type out that famous command
Del c:\windows\system32\drivers\crowdstrike\c-00000291*.sys
I’d auto complete the folders with tab and the 5 zero’s … Probably gonna have that file in my memory forever
Edit: one painful self inflicted problem was my password is 25 random LastPass generatied password. But IDK how I managed it, I never typed it wrong. Yay for small wins