Sys admins all over the world are having (or are about to have) a very bad Friday and a very long weekend.
The short (preliminary) version is that it looks like Crowdstrike (whose software is supposed to detect and prevent cyberattacks) pushed out a flawed update which now prevents affected machines from booting.
Local computers can be safe-booted to a command prompt and the bad executables replaced or removed. But given that the problem prevents machines from booting, remotely-managed computers may be hosed for a while.
Well, that would explain why four of the store’s computers and several of our cash registers crashed within a few minutes of each other just before I left for the night.
My work laptop first started showing signs of this late yesterday. I was up getting some water and tried to get the computer out of the BSOD a few times, during which it identified the issue as CrowdStrike.
We are an office of the US Goverment with some 10,000 employees.
The crowdstrike promo says ‘Cyber risk that starts with Microsoft ends with CrowdStrike.’ Yet good luck buying some coffee today at the Big Lots store!
I wonder if this is why my ISP had a “scheduled outage” that I never saw announced anywhere and on an unusual date. (They’re usually early Sunday morning.) Or if I just somehow missed it.
Why wouldn’t they stagger the roll out of (non-emergency) software updates to batches of users randomly to avoid this sort of mass outage? Or perhaps they already do that?
One aspect that I find interesting:
It’s been about 16 hours since the problems started, and I haven’t seen any political ranting and raving yet. No conspiracy theories, no accusations of Chinese/Russian/Iranian hackers, or CIA false flag operations etc.
Compare it to the Trump assassination attempt-- the crazies were making accusations almost immediately
But with this crisis, human beings all around the world all seem to be behaving rationally.
Which is , I think, an observation that seems newsworthy and relevant to this thread.
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(note to mods: yes, I know this is a breaking news thread…But mentioning the lack of a certain type of news reports constitutes part of the breaking news, too, doesn’t it? If not…my apologies, and please hide my post.)
Oh crap, I hope this doesn’t effect slot machines. They aren’t online games, but I think updates might be connected to the internet. I need all the slots to be up and running, Fridays are my biggest days!
911 service went down across the country. Maybe not 100% but a very large portion of it. Along with computer sided dispatch, reports, warrants… just about everything police and first responder related. What used to be handled with map and a radio is all on computer and affected. Hearing about it on cop pages I’m on.
My work laptop is dead in the water this morning. IT so far has requested I come into the IT office in Virginia. I work at the company HQ in Massachusetts…
It’s a trusted security driver that needs to run at the kernel level to trap bad behaviours.
I am in the midst of getting one of my large Logistics customers back online so they can get trucks moving across the border. Luckily the fix is not hard, but takes 5-10 minutes per server.
