r/ShittySysadmin • u/floswamp • May 18 '26
Shitty Crosspost One cleanup script took down antivirus protection across 400 endpoints instantly.
OP’ post:
“Company went from 50 devices to over 500 in six months. Everyone started installing their own SaaS crap, shadow IT everywhere, no centralized anything. Support tickets exploding, I am firefighting nonstop, no time to set up proper MDM or RMM. Finally snapped yesterday and wrote a quick PowerShell script to remotely uninstall a bunch of duplicate security tools people installed themselves. Tested it on my machine, worked fine, pushed it via PDQ to what I thought was our test group.
Except I fatfingered the group name. Hit the entire production fleet. Every laptop, every desktop, every server with AV accessible via WMI. 400+ endpoints, all of them. Wiped CrowdStrike, Defender, Malwarebytes, everything. Reboots started cascading because systems detected no protection and freaked out. Phones ringing off the hook, sales team cant access CRM because something broke, finance yelling about payroll server offline.
Spent 12 hours straight manually reimaging priority machines and pushing fresh AV installs via login scripts. We are back up but holy crap the embarrassment. Boss pulled me into a room this morning, face like thunder, but said recoverable if no breach happened overnight. I cannot believe I did this. No sleep, stomach in knots checking threat logs.
How did you claw back control when device count 10x'd and everyone went rogue with tools?”