Emory University SCCM Server Accidentally Reformats All Computers Campus-wide

acidradio writes: "Somehow the SCCM application and image deployment server at Emory University in Atlanta accidentally started to repartition, reformat then install a new image of Windows 7 onto all university-managed computers. By the time this was discovered the SCCM server had managed to repartition and reformat itself. This was likely an accident. But what if it weren't? Could this have shed light on a possibly huge vulnerability in large enterprise organizations that rely heavily on automated software deployment packages like SCCM?"

Comments

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, SCCM also supports Linux and Mac OSX clients. I wonder whether it tried to install Windows 7 on them also? Users would be really pissed to discover their Mac/Linux box was now lurching under Windows...

Re:Sounds like IT incompetence

[jd2112]

SCCM is pretty good. It makes my desktop techs jobs significantly easier to deploy assets company wide. In this case, it sounds like someone pressed some buttons without being 100% clear as to what was going on. Unfortunate someone will not be working in IT ever again.

Or perhaps someone decided that having a testing environment for deployment packages was an unnecessary expense combined with personnel who aren't properly trained. Just think how much money they saved by eliminating training and a test environment!