CrowdStrike

[Roger_Gooner]

Has VM been affected by the CrowdStrike bug? It has hit Windows devices in lots of businesses worldwide. Interestingly, if you are wondering why systems as diverse as airline check-in and payments are affected, the reason is probably because in the background there is communication with a Windows PC which has gone down, so the whole system fails. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

[Adduxi]

That's a bit of a lame advertisement for Windows Defender.  I would still be blaming Cloudstrike for not testing patches before sending out.  Anyway, lets see how many Corporates think about using Cloudstrike in the future?

[goslow]

It's a bit rich of Microsoft piling in with that when MS routinely trashes computers every month, and in all manner of ways, with inadequately tested Windows updates.

[Adduxi]

In fairness, I've a few Win 10 / 11 Pro machines here and I honestly can't remember the last time WU "trashed" any of them.  However, I run quite "clean" machines and don't install stuff willy nilly.  

[Roger_Gooner]

One thing that's been underreported was what had to be done where virtual machines are hosted on a cloud provider like Microsoft Azure. These VMs on Azure have no console access (as is common), so you can't boot them into safe mode by constantly whacking the F8 key.  Instead each VM had to be shut down, a replacement VM had to be created, the system disk from the affected VM had to be mounted to the new VM, delete the buggy file, unmount and start the new VM. Then repeat for the load of other affected VMs as the company had outsourced to a cloud provider.

[pete_at_home]

Nightly VM snapshots would be a good idea.

[Adduxi]

That's quite a common thing to do in large Corporates.  In fact I still take regular Veeam backups of all my own hardware.  😉

[Roger_Gooner]

My understanding is that for Azure, and I'm sure for other cloud providers, it's simple to create and manage snapshots of your VM's OS disk for recovery. The whole thing can be automated with scripts.