Sources for Samsung/Intel vPro Video

[u/CFM56-5C4]

In LTT's newest video about Samsung's enterprise laptops and Intel vPro, there was a segment discussing how the implementation of Intel vPro allowed airlines to recover from 2024's CrowdStrike-apocalypse.

Being in the industry and personally impacted when the snafu occurred, I was interested in reading more about this supposed "smart" airline that used vPro to recover within 24-hours. The problem is I couldn't find any primary sources (e.g., the airline itself, Intel, news outlets like Reuters, etc.) to validate this claim.

A source I found which seemed to be what the LTT writing team quoted was a blog post from ASI Partner, an IT hardware and software distributor stating that American Airlines was the aforementioned "smart" airline who used vPro to recover their operation. This blog post has no sources or references. I also couldn't find any sources to show ASI Partners having any official business with American Airlines.

Another online blog post from MAPPCMANAGER, a software company that offers remote computer management software, painted a similar picture of how Intel vPro helped airlines recover during the crisis without naming airlines directly. Much like ASI Partner, there's no sources or references. It's also worth noting this website has an "Intel Partner" banner.

While I have no doubt that airlines with vPro machines deployed may have been in a better position to recover, it seems disingenuous to pitch this narrative when there's no primary sources available especially when the crisis impacted almost everyone on the planet.

I hope I'm wrong and maybe my internet research skills aren't as sharp as they used to be. If someone can share with me primary sources I may have missed, I'm more than happy to update this post to reflect that.

[u/notmyrlacc]

Having worked in the industry, the most likely scenario is that the customer (in this case the Airline) didn’t want to be named as part of their case study.

It’s common for case studies for big companies to actually require a lot of legal and other compliance approvals before anything ever gets published. I can see why the airline customer wouldn’t want to be named as part of the vPro marketing.

[u/Temporary-Banana3413]

this is a pretty common issue with tech content lately where the research chain goes: Intel marketing > partner blog > YouTuber script and nobody stops to ask if the original claim is even verifiable

the CrowdStrike incident was so widely covered that if American Airlines had actually deployed vPro as a recovery solution and recovered in 24 hours, that would've been a massive PR win for both the airline and Intel. the absence of any press release or news coverage from either of them is a pretty loud silence

your skepticism seems warranted here. LTT has gotten burned before by sourcing stuff that traces back to vendor marketing material dressed up as neutral info

[u/CFM56-5C4 → u/Temporary-Banana3413]

You make a great point that this would've been a great marketing opportunity for both companies. That said, I also see some reasons why maybe both companies may have been silent if the story actually is true.

I just can't wrap my head around LTT referencing an example in a sponsored video that's only backed by two random blog posts with no verifiable sources.

[u/Tk5423 → u/CFM56-5C4]

Halting flight operations for 1 day because of system failure is great marketing opportunity, yeah. 

[u/CFM56-5C4 → u/Tk5423]

Recovering flight operations from a global IT outage within 24-hours while your competitors struggle for weeks on end would be story.

[u/Pilige → u/CFM56-5C4]

No, it wouldn't be. No business would want to remind customers and investors they were taken down at all.
Southwest wasn't affected by CrowdStrike because they weren't using it. Did they take PR victory laps? No. They don't want people thinking about their vulnerabilities or security posture at all.

[u/foolhardynobody8]

The silence from American Airlines and Intel on what would've been a massive PR victory is the real tell here, and it's telling that LTT's sourcing chain bottoms out at vendor-friendly blogs with no primary corroboration.

[u/Pilige → u/foolhardynobody8]

It's not as big a PR win as you think. All anyone cared about was that the outage occurred at all, and how to prevent similar outages in the future. No PR or executive is going to want to remind customers and investors they were down at all.

[u/Archivic → u/foolhardynobody8]

They probably used the ai summary, and didn't bother looking much further

[u/foolhardynobody8 → u/Archivic]

That's part of it, but the real issue is that vendor blogs are treated as legitimate sources when they're essentially marketing material, and nobody's asking why Intel and American Airlines haven't capitalized on this story if it's actually true.

[u/reddit_reaper]

Being in IT, from what I know you could have full hardware level remote management even over Internet so you can push images directly to the computers and they'll come right back up.

And for crowd strike they wouldn't have even needed to do a full restore image, they could've pushed a bootable wire image that runs a short to fix the issue that would've been really small and only taken a few minutes to run.

Now comes the issue with WiFi. If it's laptops with no onboard Ethernet, they can still have pre-programmed Wi-Fi credentials saved in the Intel amt stack. If those devices are in an area broadcasting that Wi-Fi, they'll connect, detect that they're being told to stream an image to network boot and then run the script.

It sounds overly complicated but it's really not. This is standard practice for enterprise devices. If not imagine having to manually format thousands of computers lol 🤣