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Some bad code just broke a billion Windows machines (www.youtube.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike pushed an update that caused millions of Windows computers to enter recovery mode, triggering the blue screen of death. Learn ...

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[–] 66 points 2 years ago* (18 children)

Are there really a billion systems in the world that run Crowdstrike? That seems implausible. Is it just hyperbole?

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  • [–] 44 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Probably includes a bunch of virtual machines.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Yeah, our VMs completely died at work. Has to set up temporary stuff on hardware we had laying around today. Was kinda fun, but stressful haha.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Could you just revert VMs to a snapshot before the update? Or do you not take periodic snapshots? You could probably also mount the VM's drive on the host and delete the relevant file that way.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yes you can just go into safe mode on an affected machine and delete the offending file. The problem is it took a couple hours before that resolution was found, and it has to be done by hand on every VM. I can’t just run an Ansible playbook against hundreds of non-booted VMs. Then you have to consider in the case of servers, there might be a specific start up order, certain things might have to be started before other things and further fixing might be required given that every VM hard crashed. At the minimum it took many companies 6-12 hours to get back up and running and on many more it could take days.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I doubt it's too much of a stretch, since even here in australia, we've had multiple airlines, news stations, banks, supermarkets and many others, including the aluminium extrusion business my father works at, all go down, scale this do hundreds of countries with populations tenfold of ours, it puts it into perspective that there may even be more than a billion machines affected

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Despite how it may seem on Lemmy, most people have not yet actually switched to Linux. This stat is legit.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I know that Windows is everywhere, I just don't know the percentage of Windows computers that run Crowdstrike.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Keep in mind, it's not just clients, but servers too. A friend of mine works for a decently sized company that has about 1600 (virtual) servers internationally. And yes, all of them were affected.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    You do realize that linux is something like 80% of servers. Which also well out number personal machines. If you include android linux is easily the most used os on the planet.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Sounds pretty plausible to me. An organization doesn’t have to be very big to get into the hundreds or thousands of devices on a network when you account for servers and VM.

    A company with 40 employees all accessing and RDS server using a company laptop is looking at 85+ devices already

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