Technology

Please, enlighten me how you'd remotely service a few thousand Bitlocker-locked machines, that won't boot far enough to get an internet connection, with non-tech-savvy users behind them. Pray tell what common "basic hygiene" practices would've helped, especially with Crowdstrike reportedly ignoring and bypassing the rollout policies set by their customers.

Not saying the rest of your post is wrong, but this stood out as easily glossed over.

bloated IT budgets

Can you point me to one of these companies?

In general IT is run as a “cost center” which means they have to scratch and save everywhere they can. Every IT department I have seen is under staffed and spread too thin. Also, since it is viewed as a cost, getting all teams to sit down and make DR plans (since these involve the entire company, not just IT) is near impossible since “we may spend a lot of time and money on a plan we never need”.

An underlying problem is that legal security is mostly security theatre. Legal security provides legal cover for entities without much actual security.

The point of legal security is not to protect privacy, users, etc., but to protect the liability of legal entities when the inevitable happens.

neglecting the due diligence necessary to ensure those solutions truly fit their needs.

CrowdStrike perfectly met their needs by proving someone else to blame. I don't think anybody is facing any consequences for contracting with CrowdStrike. It's the same deal with Microsoft X 10000000. These bad incentives are the whole point of the system.

Bloated IT budgets?

Where do you work, and are they hiring?

The real problem is the monopolization of IT and the Cloud.

Issue is definitely corporate greed outsourcing issues to a mega monolith IT company.

Most IT departments are idiots now. Even 15 years ago, those were the smartest nerds in most buildings. They had to know how to do it all. Now it's just installing the corporate overlord software and the bullshit spyware. When something goes wrong, you call the vendor's support line. That's not IT, you've just outsourced all your brains to a monolith that can go at any time.

None of my servers running windows went down. None of my infrastructure. None of the infrastructure I manage as side hustles.

I think it's most likely a little of both. It seems like the fact most systems failed at around the same time suggests that this was the default automatic upgrade /deployment option.

So, for sure the default option should have had upgrades staggered within an organisation. But at the same time organisations should have been ensuring they aren't upgrading everything at once.

As it is, the way the upgrade was deployed made the software a single point of failure that completely negated redundancies and in many cases hobbled disaster recovery plans.

I've worked in various and sundry IT jobs for over 35 years. In every job, they paid a lot of lip service and performed a lot box-checking towards cybersecurity, disaster recovery, and business continuity.

But, as important as those things are, they are not profitable in the minds of a board of directors. Nor are they sexy to a sales and marketing team. They get taken for granted as "just getting done behind the scenes".

Meanwhile, everyone's real time, budget, energy, and attention is almost always focused on the next big release, or bug fixes in app code, and/or routine desktop support issues.

It's a huge problem. Unfortunately it's how the moden management "style" and late stage capitalism operates. Make a fuss over these things, and you're flagged as a problem, a human obstacle to be run over.

https://how.complexsystems.fail/

particularly for companies entrusted with vast amounts of sensitive personal information.

I nodded along to most of your comment but this cast a discordant and jarring tone over it. Why particularly those companies? The CrowdStrike failure didn't actually result in sensitive information being deleted or revealed, it just caused computers to shut down entirely. Throwing that in there as an area of particular concern seems clickbaity.

I don't think it's that uncommon an opinion. An even simpler version is the constant repeats over years now of information breaches, often because of inferior protect. As a amateur website creator decades ago I learned that plain text passwords was a big no-no, so how are corporation ITs still doing it? Even the non-tech person on the street rolls their eyes at such news, and yet it continues. CrowdStrike is just a more complicated version of the same thing.

This doesn't seem to be a problem with disaster recovery plans. It is perfectly reasonable for disaster recovery to take several hours, or even days. As far as DR goes, this was easy. It did not generally require rebuilding systems from backups.

In a sane world, no single party would even have the technical capability of causing a global disaster like this. But executives have been tripping over themselves for the past decade to outsource all their shit to centralized third parties so they can lay off expensive IT staff. They have no control over their infrastructure, their data, or, by extension, their business.

Getting production servers back online with a low level fix is pretty straightforward if you have your backup system taking regular snapshots of pet VMs. Just roll back a few hours. Properly managed cattle, just redeploy the OS and reconnect to data. Physical servers of either type you can either restore a backup (potentially with the IPMI integration so it happens automatically), but you might end up taking hours to restore all data, limited by the bandwidth of your giant spinning rust NAS that is cost cut to only sustain a few parallel recoveries. Or you could spend a few hours with your server techs IPMI booting into safe mode, or write a script that sends reboot commands to the IPMI until the host OS pings back.

All that stuff can be added to your DR plan, and many companies now are probably planning for such an event. It's like how the US CDC posted a plan about preparing for the zombie apocalypse to help people think about it, this was a fire drill for a widespread ransomware attack. And we as a world weren't ready. There's options, but they often require humans to be helping it along when it's so widespread.

The stinger of this event is how many workstations were affected in parallel. First, there do not exist good tools to be able to cover a remote access solution at the firmware level capable of executing power controls over the internet. You have options in an office building for workstations onsite, there are a handful of systems that can do this over existing networks, but more are highly hardware vendor dependent.

But do you really want to leave PXE enabled on a workstation that will be brought home and rebooted outside of your physical/electronic perimeter? The last few years have showed us that WFH isn't going away, and those endpoints that exist to roam the world need to be configured in a way that does not leave them easily vulnerable to a low level OS replacement the other 99.99% of the time you aren't getting crypto'd or receive a bad kernel update.

Even if you place trust in your users and don't use a firmware password, do you want an untrained user to be walked blindly over the phone to open the firmware settings, plug into their router's Ethernet port, and add https://winfix.companyname.com as a custom network boot option without accidentally deleting the windows bootloader? Plus, any system that does that type of check automatically at startup makes itself potentially vulnerable to a network-based attack by a threat actor on a low security network (such as the network of an untrusted employee or a device that falls into the wrong hands). I'm not saying such a system is impossible - but it's a super huge target for a threat actor to go after and it needs to be ironclad.

Given all of that, a lot of companies may instead opt that their workstations are cattle, and would simply be re-imaged if they were crypto'd. If all of your data is on the SMB server/OneDrive/Google/Nextcloud/Dropbox/SaaS whatever, and your users are following the rules, you can fix the problem by swapping a user's laptop - just like the data problem from paragraph one. You just have a team scale issue that your IT team doesn't have enough members to handle every user having issues at once.

The reality is there are still going to be applications and use cases that may be critical that don't support that methodology (as we collectively as IT slowly try to deprecate their use), and that is going to throw a Windows-sized monkey wrench into your DR plan. Do you force your uses to use a VDI solution? Those are pretty dang powerful, but as a Parsec user that has operated their computer from several hundred miles away, you can feel when a responsive application isn't responding quite fast enough. That VDI system could be recovered via paragraph 1 and just use Chromebooks (or equivalent) that can self-reimage if needed as the thin clients. But would you rather have annoyed users with a slightly less performant system 99.99% of the time or plan for a widespread issue affecting all system the other 0.01%? You're probably already spending your energy upgrading from legacy apps to make your workstations more like cattle.

All in trying to get at here with this long winded counterpoint - this isn't an easy problem to solve. I'd love to see the day that IT shops are valued enough to get the budget they need informed by the local experts, and I won't deny that "C-suite went to x and came back with a bad idea" exists. In the meantime, I think we're all going to instead be working on ensuring our update policies have better controls on them.

As a closing thought - if you audited a vendor that has a product that could get a system back online into low level recovery after this, would you make a budget request for that product? Or does that create the next CrowdStruckOut event? Do you dual-OS your laptops? How far do you go down the rabbit hole of preparing for the low probability? This is what you have to think about - you have to solve enough problems to get your job done, and not everyone is in an industry regulated to have every problem required to be solved. So you solve what you can by order of probability.