You may have heard, repeatedly, the importance of keeping your computer updated. You may even have been given case studies of companies that fell prey to ransomware not because they did not have an antivirus or a firewall solution in place, but because their computers software and operating systems were not running the current version and/or were not properly updated. The WannaCry Ransomware comes to mind, which at the time was touted as the biggest attack of its kind in history. It was widely reported that the main reason more than 250,000 computers across 150 countries, with total damages ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, was because those computers had not installed a patch that had been released by Microsoft 2 months earlier.
As a result, you may be one of the responsible business owners that took the step of designating an employee (or you outsourced the role) to ensure all your computers are regularly updated. However, this may have brought about another frustration. Since Windows 10 first launched back in July 2015, the operating system’s update feature has gained an unfortunate reputation for being intrusive, difficult to configure, and with a nark of installing updates at the worst possible time for as long as 1 hour in some instances. It is easily the worst feature in Windows 10.
Last week many users around the world complained of experiencing the Blue Screen of Death when they tried to print after their computers were updated with Microsoft's March 2021 update. Because KB5000802 is a security update, it was downloaded and installed automatically for most computers whose users did not have a say on whether to install the update or not, which ultimately caused their computers to crash, resulting in lost productivity.
Printing Blue Screen Crash
Four of the total computers we manage were affected. The issue happened when the users tried to print which resulted in the Blue Screen of Death. We fixed the issue by uninstalling the updates. We then went a step ahead and proactively blacklisted the update using our Remote Monitoring and Management tool across all our clients and their computers.
Our RMM Tool Setup to Override the problematic March 2021 Update
On Tuesday, 15th March 2021, Microsoft released out-of-band non-security updates to fix the issue. The cumulative updates containing the fix are published as optional updates as such they will not be installed automatically via Windows Update. Users will need to go through a manual process to install the updates on each of their computers in order to implement the fix provided by Microsoft. For most of our install base, we pushed this fix from our Remote Monitoring and Management tool without them ever knowing that for the last seven days there was an issue that could have cost them business, but their IT team was able to arrest it before it manifested.
How does your company manage Windows and 3rd party updates? Post your comments below.
Image: Tripwire
Protus Agufa
Founder and chief visionary of ANQAD Systems. Protus is a budding change agent, Technology Strategist, a Husband, a Father of Two Beautiful Daughters and part of the body of Christ - not necessarily in that order.