Emory University Windows Network Wiped Out! Blame EMP’s, Cyberwar, Squirrels? Try Accidental Reformat.

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.infosecnews.org/emory-university-windows-network-wiped-out-blame-emps-cyberwar-squirrels-try-accidental-reformat/

By William Knowles
Senior Editor
InfoSec News
May 18, 2014

On Monday May 12th 2014, sometime during the 169th Commencement Exercises 
of Emory University, what best could be called a career limiting move, a 
Windows 7 deployment image was accidentally sent to all Windows machines, 
(approximately 2000+ machines) including laptops, desktops, and even 
servers. This image started with a repartition / reformat set of tasks.

As soon as the accident was discovered, the SCCM server was powered off – 
however, by that time, the SCCM server itself had been repartitioned and 
reformatted.

Restoration of Emory.edu servers began immediately, but the process took 
far longer than expected, The Emory Information Technology team started 
using consultants to help validate the health of the SCCM servers and that 
work only completed only recently.

To put this in perspective, Emory’s IT staff were unable to use the 
preferred methods for redeploying images to desktops/laptops and relied on 
older methods – USB + Ghost, LANDesk (Emory still had their old LANDesk 
server) + PXE. These methods required a lot of manual work plus their 
success was uneven with them.

[...]

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