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How IKEA Patched Shellshock
jones_supa writes: Magnus Glantz, IT manager at IKEA, revealed that the Swedish furniture retailer has more than 3,500 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. With Shellshock, every single one of those servers needed to be patched to limit the risk of exploitation. So how did IKEA patch all those servers? Glantz showed a simple one-line Linux command and then jokingly walked away from the podium stating "That's it, thanks for coming." On a more serious note, he said that it took approximately two and half hours to upgrade their infrastructure to defend against Shellshock. The key was having a consistent approach to system management, which begins with a well-defined Standard Operating Environment (SOE). Additionally, Glantz has defined a lifecycle management plan that describes the lifecycle of how Linux will be used at Ikea for the next seven years.
I was there. It was said in a very joking manner. From the moment he started he showed his sense of humour.
In fact, his whole presentation was funny, amusing and had some good information.
The idea that he showed a one line command to patch wasn't the biggest shock of the talk. (Sorry, I don't recall the command.) It was the fact that he patches the 3,500 servers ONCE A MONTH. Straight into production. This caused some questions and discussion.
FTFA, "One of the potential challenges of constantly updating servers is the risk that applications break when new server operating system software is loaded. Glantz, however, isn't worried and noted that RHEL offers the promise of Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatibility across updates." The rest of his reasoning, and another amusing moment, is described at the end of the article.
Vip