Last Friday, a cybersecurity update from CrowdStrike plunged approximately 8.5 million Windows PCs into a state of perpetual blue screen of death, causing a global IT outage. This affected critical systems across various sectors, including point-of-sale systems, hospitals, emergency services, airlines, and countless businesses. The only solution for affected systems was to boot into Safe Mode and manually delete the faulty files, requiring physical access to each machine.
Grant Thornton Australia, a major assurance, tax, and advisory firm, was hit hard by the outage, with over 100 servers going offline. Facing a daunting task of bringing them back online, the IT team at Grant Thornton found an innovative solution – barcode scanners. They realized they had the BitLocker keys for all their servers, which they then converted into barcodes using a custom script. These barcodes were displayed on a secure management server.
The script was designed to generate a barcode specific to each machine, which could then be scanned. Windows recognized the scanned barcode and automatically inputted the corresponding BitLocker key, effectively bypassing the need for manual entry. This significantly sped up the recovery process, reducing downtime from 20 minutes per machine to a mere 3-5 minutes. The use of a $58 AUD barcode scanner proved to be a cost-effective and efficient solution, saving Grant Thornton thousands of dollars in lost productivity and manpower.
