Customer Impact Story

Microsoft: Responding to "ASRmageddon" 12 Hours Faster Than the Vendor

One Friday the 13th, a flawed Microsoft Defender update began deleting application shortcuts on thousands of PCs worldwide, grinding productivity to a halt. Infused Innovations’ managed services team responded immediately, developing and deploying a remediation script that restored our clients’ systems a full 12 hours before Microsoft released its official fix.

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The Incident

In January 2023, Microsoft pushed a flawed Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rule definition update for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. This faulty update, nicknamed "ASRmageddon," caused the security software to incorrectly identify and delete application shortcuts from the Start Menu and Taskbar of Windows PCs across the globe.

The Challenge

For our managed services customers, the impact was immediate and severe. Users woke up to find their application shortcuts gone, rendering their computers unusable for normal work and flooding helpdesks with support tickets. With Microsoft’s own fix hours away, the challenge was to restore productivity for our clients as quickly as humanly possible.

The Solution

The Infused Innovations team took immediate, decisive action. First, we mitigated further damage by changing the problematic ASR rule to "Audit-only" across our client base. Simultaneously, our engineers developed a custom remediation script designed to restore the most common application shortcuts. We then tested and pushed this script out to all our managed clients.

The Results

Our managed services customers were back up and running with their critical applications restored a full 12 hours before Microsoft released its first official remediation script. After ensuring our clients were stable, we released our script publicly on GitHub for free to benefit the wider technical community still struggling with the issue. This incident showcased our team's proactive, rapid-response capabilities and our commitment to the community.

When Every Second Counts, Expertise Matters

"ASRmageddon" was a real-world test of our managed services promise. Our ability to diagnose the problem, develop a custom solution, and deploy it faster than the vendor themselves demonstrates a level of expertise and agility that provides immense value to our clients and the community.

Faster Remediation

We developed and deployed a working fix for our clients a full 12 hours before Microsoft released its own official script, drastically reducing downtime.

Rapid Response

Our team immediately took action to mitigate the issue and engineer a solution, showcasing the value of our expert managed services.

 

Community-First

After restoring our clients, we released our remediation script publicly and for free on GitHub to help the thousands of other affected organizations. 

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