this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Here are the details about what went wrong on Friday.

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[–] DogPeePoo@lemm.ee 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

CrowdStrike lives up to its name

[–] unfnknblvbl 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

This number seems quite low. My organisation alone would have had something like 3000 employee devices taken down. Since it happened on a day where most people WFH, there's at least another thousand static devices in my building alone that may not have been in use at the time that will shit the bed tomorrow morning.

The same thing applies to our much larger sister companies interstate. So that's another 6,000 or so devices.

The two largest energy retailers were affected too, so that's another 5,000 devices at a conservative estimate.

Then there's all the self-service checkouts that went down across Australia. I have no idea how many there are, but if every Coles and Woolworths has ten of them, that's another ~40,000 devices.

That's just the organisations that I am personally aware of as being affected in Australia and can get ballpark figures for.

Obviously Microsoft are getting their figures from the auto-reportimg that happened on each crash, but it really does seem like it's too low.

It's beyond time to diversify our IT infrastructure. Enough with sticking everything "in the cloud" and paying for software (and devices!!) we don't own.

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

So, those numbers all account for about 54,000 of the 8.5 million devices. Using fairly generous rounding, that still leaves approximately 8.5 million more devices.

A million is a lot.

[–] unfnknblvbl 1 points 3 months ago

Way to miss the point. That's 54,000 that one person knows of across a small handful of organisations in one small country. I'm not even including the dozens more organisations I know were affected but can't come up with a ballpark figure for.

[–] Irremarkable@fedia.io 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Yknow I almost majored in IT/anything in that realm. Real glad I didn't right now. And most other times, but especially right now.

[–] Greyghoster@aussie.zone 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How many systems in the world’s military went down, you know in war machines of Russia and Israel and Ukraine?

[–] Avg@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Those computers don't have auto update enabled

[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Absolutely that. For networks that matter, patches are usually tested independently. While I wouldn't trust the average military command to do patch testing, any civilian/corporate contractors absolutely would, because money. (Microsoft is likely at the top of that stack...)

There are other conditions as well. EDR infrastructure, if it exists, would need to be isolated on a "Government cloud" which is a different beast completely. Plus, there are different levels of networks, some being air-gapped.

[–] Greyghoster@aussie.zone 1 points 3 months ago

Normally I would agree however this doesn’t appear to be a Microsoft update but a CrowdStrike update. Given that everyone is worried about ransomware etc.