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Australian tech fixes ClownStrike problem with a $55 bar code scanner and 20 minutes!
Rob Woltz, tech geek at an Australian tax/accounting firm with lots of PCs with encrypted hard drives, is one clever boffin.
Here's the problem. Encrypted hard drives. The key for unlocking the drive is 48 hexadecimal characters long! Your success rate of conveying that over the phone is very, VERY low.
Ron remembered that Windows PCs considers a bar code scanner no different than a keyboard, so he went down to an office supply store and bought one. Then he printed a bar code of the key, plugged in the scanner into one of the bricked PCs, booted it, and pointed the scanner at the bar code! And it unlocked the hard drive! Plug in a recovery flash drive, delete the bad ClownStrike signature file, reboot, and the PC is working just fine!
THEY FIXED ALL OF THEIR BRICKED MACHINES BY LUNCH TIME!
It took 3-5 minutes per PC, 20-30 minutes per server!
It is so nice when smarts overcomes a problem! Rob deserves a commendation and a nice little bonus for working out this solution.
I attended an seminar once where the subject was something along the lines of 'When things go to hell', basically when your database server breaks in a really horrific way. What's the first thing you do?
Walk away. Go get a cup of coffee, and think. Because if you jump in and start trying to fix things, you're much more likely to make things worse than if you step back, and form a plan to triage the situation and assess it to figure out what happened, THEN set to fixing things.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/25/crowdstrike_remediation_with_barcode_scanner/
(I really need to go through all my ClownStrike posts and tag 'em consistently!)
Here's the problem. Encrypted hard drives. The key for unlocking the drive is 48 hexadecimal characters long! Your success rate of conveying that over the phone is very, VERY low.
Ron remembered that Windows PCs considers a bar code scanner no different than a keyboard, so he went down to an office supply store and bought one. Then he printed a bar code of the key, plugged in the scanner into one of the bricked PCs, booted it, and pointed the scanner at the bar code! And it unlocked the hard drive! Plug in a recovery flash drive, delete the bad ClownStrike signature file, reboot, and the PC is working just fine!
THEY FIXED ALL OF THEIR BRICKED MACHINES BY LUNCH TIME!
It took 3-5 minutes per PC, 20-30 minutes per server!
It is so nice when smarts overcomes a problem! Rob deserves a commendation and a nice little bonus for working out this solution.
I attended an seminar once where the subject was something along the lines of 'When things go to hell', basically when your database server breaks in a really horrific way. What's the first thing you do?
Walk away. Go get a cup of coffee, and think. Because if you jump in and start trying to fix things, you're much more likely to make things worse than if you step back, and form a plan to triage the situation and assess it to figure out what happened, THEN set to fixing things.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/25/crowdstrike_remediation_with_barcode_scanner/
(I really need to go through all my ClownStrike posts and tag 'em consistently!)
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And remembering boot sequence! Bar code readers are fun, I use them all the time in the library. And almost 40 years ago I wrote a program for printing labels for one. Programming the scanner and writing the program for reading the scanner was interesting!
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I keep thinking you work for the library, but is it in the library's IT department? Or is IT stuff just a hobby?
I work as a firmware engineer, so I'm mainly an IT consumer. Though the firmware I work on is embedded in switches and routers, so very much a part of network operations.
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That's very cool work that you do! And very much completely out of my field. I'm quasi-retired IT geek. I was a database developer/SQL Server administrator since the mid '80s. Now I'm a librarian, but I'm planning on doing a refresh and seeing if I can find higher income employment back in the database field again once we complete our relocation in a year or so. Our library is part of a university, and there's only 2.5 FTEs (I'm the half-timer), we don't have an IT department, the school provides that. I do a lot of database work for my own amusement, though. Producing reports that systems don't have, etc.
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My wife's medical problems means that we can no longer live at high altitude, she's an astronomer and we live at 9,000' on top of a mountain, about half an hour from the telescope. Maine is a strong contender for next location: low altitude and a place that she's familiar with. She's from Ohio and they used to vacation regularly in Maine, she has two sisters living there.
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Good thing they had one key throughout their entire org! Greatly simplified their recovery.
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UGH...............
Hugs, Jon
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Apparently no one else saw the Buzzfeed article 'This one little trick helps you recover your encrypted hard drives faster!' ;-)
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