The CrowdStrike outage of 2024, which blue-screened millions of Windows machines, highlighted the critical need for swift and secure IT systems recovery strategies and processes. This guide provides an in-depth look at best practices for password management and secure access to essential information like administrative passwords and BitLocker recovery keys, with a focus on minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. We'll also discuss how solutions like Bravura Pass Plus can streamline the recovery process, enhance security protocols, and provide rapid access to critical information.
In This Article:
The 2024 CrowdStrike outage stands as the most extensive IT infrastructure failure in history, crippling upwards of 8.5 million Windows machines. The scale of disruption affected vital sectors such as airlines, hospitals, emergency call centers, and businesses ranging from small enterprises to large corporations worldwide.
This unprecedented event emphasized the need for rapid recovery capabilities across businesses of all sizes. It's no longer a luxury reserved for regulated organizations and large corporations; even small businesses with just ten employees faced crippling consequences. Additionally, large organizations depend on smaller third-party services, making it crucial to ensure that the entire supply chain can recover swiftly.
Swift recovery necessitates prompt and secure access to administrative secrets, including BitLocker recovery keys. When an outage like this occurs, you can’t wait for key personnel to return from vacations or other absences – you need access immediately.
Software outages can paralyze systems, resulting in widespread disruption. The CrowdStrike outage revealed that the ability to access critical secrets, like administrative passwords and BitLocker recovery keys, is often a bottleneck in the recovery process. This event showcased the vulnerability of existing password and secret management systems in many organizations.
The main challenges organizations faced included:
A robust system for storing and sharing secrets is vital to avoid delays in recovery and mitigate the risks associated with ad-hoc solutions. When those secrets could be accessed, many organizations lack secure methods to share sensitive information. Employees then resorted to using email, IMs, and third-party services, compromising security. Organizations now face the daunting task of resetting passwords and recovery keys to new, secure values since this sensitive information is in the wild.
A comprehensive password governance solution like Bravura Pass Plus can address these challenges by:
Bravura Pass Plus's unique capabilities, covering employees, administrative, functional, and shared domains, ensure you can rapidly execute recovery operations.
Adopting Bravura Pass Plus is a straightforward process as a SaaS application:
Deploy Secret Vaulting Capabilities:
Rapidly implement Bravura Pass Plus's secret vaulting features for your employees. Educate them on the importance of:
Use relatable examples like, "Remember the CrowdStrike event when Dave was on vacation? It took us a day longer to recover because we couldn’t access the secrets quickly.”
Enable Bravura Pass Plus's automated password securing logic for primary domains like Azure AD, Active Directory, and Okta. This ensures that passwords are periodically re-secured to strong values and stored in secure vaults, mitigating the risk of forgotten or insecurely stored passwords.
Review Your Security Posture:
Use Bravura Pass Plus to get a comprehensive view of your organization’s passwords across all domains, laptops, servers, cloud services, and on-premises applications. Tag controls used to secure accounts and proactively establish mitigation strategies and recovery playbooks.
Adopt Best Practices:
Implement certification of controls for various accounts. For instances where automatic securing isn’t possible, request approved exceptions and have regular attestations to ensure compliance. Motivate employees to identify and resolve security gaps proactively.
Bravura Security's response to the CrowdStrike outage showcased the effectiveness of Bravura Pass Plus, enabling system and employee access recovery within 4 hours. This was achieved by maintaining passwords and secrets in an accessible manner.
Problem Identification: The issue was quickly identified.
Communication: Clear communication was sent to employees through business and personal channels, outlining the problem and recovery steps.
Access to Recovery Keys: Employees accessed their BitLocker recovery keys via their secure vaults or requested them securely through approved channels.
Secure Sharing: When employees needed administrative credentials or help with recovery keys, IT administrators securely shared these via ephemeral, limited-time-use shares provided by Bravura Pass Plus.
Bravura Pass Plus and the broader Bravura Security Fabric enabled prompt recovery of systems and employee access in under 4 hours by maintaining all passwords and secrets in a known and accessible manner.
The benefits of Bravura Pass Plus include:
The CrowdStrike outage has proven the necessity of swift recovery from IT incidents. Solutions like Bravura Pass Plus play a key role in managing and accessing critical vault secrets to maintain operational continuity. Investing in such solutions strengthens disaster recovery plans and ensures business operations are secure against future disruptions.