Not long after Windows PCs and servers at the Australian limb of audit and tax advisory Grant Thornton started BSODing last Friday, senior systems engineer Rob Woltz remembered a small but important fact: When PCs boot, they consider barcode scanners no differently to keyboards.

That knowledge nugget became important as the firm tried to figure out how to respond to the mess CrowdStrike created, which at Grant Thornton Australia threw hundreds of PCs and no fewer than 100 servers into the doomloop that CrowdStrike's shoddy testing software made possible.

All of Grant Thornton's machines were encrypted with Microsoft's BitLocker tool, which meant that recovery upon restart required CrowdStrike's multi-step fix and entry of a 48-character BitLocker key. //

Woltz is pleased that his idea translated into a swift recovery, but also a little regretful he didn't think of using QR codes – they could have encoded sufficient data to automate the entire remediation process.