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Notes -
If your system was up when the update rolled out in the afternoon, and you turned off or reset your computer before the rollback patch, you got a BSOD easily fixable by anyone with the admin privilege.
Part of security is a monopoly on force — sorry, on access — so nobody dumb can infect the system, and few people had the privilege. I was one of the clever few who could boot with a Windows installation USB, delete the affected files, and be back up in minutes. Whereupon I was asked to get other PCs up in our building, which I gladly did.
On reddit, someone said they’d been speaking with their crowdstrike security rep the previous week, who said they had a beta for the new version which was getting BSOD on some windows systems, so they weren’t going to push it out until the bug was squashed. It’s assumed in IT the bad update accidentally got into global distrib.
Who is John Galt?
Sounds like your IT security is subpar. No drive encryption and USB boot devices not blocked? This means anyone can exfiltrate the contents of any of the drives.
Nonono, they are clearly following Best Practices (tm) -- after, they have Crowdstrike!
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People old enough to have done things like "boot from a USB drive," but not so old as to be confused by computing devices generally?
Thirty years ago, relatively few undergraduates brought their own computers to college, though most had access to some kind of computer "lab." Twenty years ago, most undergrads brought their own computers to college. Ten years ago, it was common for many programs of higher learning to "give" students a laptop for curricular use, testing, etc. Today, I get a surprising number of students whose only computing device is their cell phone, or a similarly hobbled tablet-style appliance. They live in walled gardens and think that computing begins and ends with "apps." Throwaway consumption devices are, slowly but surely, crowding from our collective consciousness the general purpose (and modular!) machines that delivered the Information Age.
And in some ways, I suppose, that was always the goal ("it was always the plan to put the world in your hands...")--just as we don't need everyone to change their own oil, or know how to fly airplanes, we don't need everyone to be using desktop computers. But in much the way that the average American utterly fails to understand or, therefore, appreciate the systems that keep them fed, keep the power on, etc., I suspect that failure to even slightly understand the technology on which our civilization functions contributes to some pretty distorted perspectives--on the world, on life, on politics, etc.
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