Hi all, we are hiring a remote worker and will be supplying a laptop to them. The laptop will be running a Debian variant of Linux on it.
We are a small shop and this is the first time we have entrusted somebody outside of our small pool of trusted employees.
We have sensitive client data on the laptop that they need to access for their day-to-day work.
However, if something goes wrong, and they do the wrong thing, we want to be able to send out some kind of command or similar, that will completely lock, block, or wipe the sensitive data.
We don’t want any form of spying or tracking. We are not interested in seeing how they use the computer, or any of the logs. We just want to be able to delete that data, or block access, if they don’t return the laptop when they leave, or if they steal the laptop, or if they do the wrong thing.
What systems are in place in the world of Linux that could do this?
Any advice or suggestions are greatly appreciated? Thank you.
Windows is absolutely more difficult to secure than linux. I can restrict access down to the kernel level in linux. Windows has no such granularity
“Easy” from the point of view there a lots of off the shelf tools to help you do it that are easy to understand.
That Crowd strike outage was pretty evident of how easy windows is to secure. Linux had the same failure but since admins are able to secure the OS in a more granular way and can update packages in situ without touching the registry, Linux users could still boot into their OS and patch the broken file. No such luck in Windows.
Windows users could boot into safe mode and modify/delete the problem file. There just wasn’t any tool to roll out this fix ‘automatically’.
Once IT dealt with it I stopped paying attention to the situation, but I wonder if any tool was created to help the poor souls managing thousands of PCs?
@Charzard4261 @horse_battery_staple , any computer running Crowdstrike, Bitlocker, and no remote access during the prebooted environment would certainly require manual intervention. Also, all those Bitlocker keys having to be manually inserted for computers that required physically being present? Hell in a shell.
Absolutely this for windows. Linux however allowed crowdstrike to run without it being a boot time event. I administer a mixed environment. I worked 18 hours straight remediating that outage.
No. If the device was encrypted it had to be done locally. Laptops had to either be wiped and restored to backup or a sysadmin had to reset the machine locally with a local admin. There was no remote remediation possible unless the sysadmin gave the user a local admin account and password.
On Linux I was able to push the new file over the network and reboot the machine.
On windows companies were shipping laptops or restoring to backups.
I dual boot windows and EndeavourOS. Every 6 to 12 months I make a concerted effort to make the switch 100% but it hasn’t worked out yet. So while Linux is great windows is unavoidable. In this use case I suspect managing Windows tools will be simpler, though I agree that effectiveness next to Linux options won’t be equal.
At home I’m 100% linux. When I was freelance I built out pure linux systems for small businesses. Nextcloud, Odoo, Google Docs were what I deployed. I still support some clients and it’s only getting easier.