Newsletter Archives

• Servers getting upgraded to 2025?

  Posted on November 5, 2024 at 17:43 CST by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  Be aware, I’m seeing reports on reddit here and here that KB5044284 is being offered up to Server 2019, 2022 and is upgrading them to Server 2025.

  As noted in the post:

  “Andrei from Heimdal here, man, I’m really sorry for the havoc that was created with this update, our team (thanks for raising this with them – I have a feeling you were the first to bring it up to our Customer Success team) managed to pinpoint this and blocked this update across all server policies to avoid any further upgrades from 2022 to 2025

  I also notice another point in the chat where you’re asking how to apply a granular approach to updates – if you’d like, we can set a call up tomorrow and we can look at this one together.

  Here’s the official com. that just went out a while ago:
  On 5th Nov 12.16UTC, Heimdal was notified by a customer about unexpected upgrades related to Windows Server 2025 in their environment. Due to the limited initial footprint, identifying the root cause took some time. By 18:05 UTC, we traced the issue to the Windows Update API, where Microsoft had mistakenly labelled the Windows Server 2025 upgrade as KB5044284.

  Our Analysis and Fix:
  Our team discovered this discrepancy in our patching repository, as the GUID for the Windows Server 2025 upgrade does not match the usual entries for KB5044284 associated with Windows 11. This appears to be an error on Microsoft’s side, affecting both the speed of release and the classification of the update. After cross-checking with Microsoft’s KB repository, we confirmed that the KB number indeed references Windows 11, not Windows Server 2025.

  Currently, we can see that approximately 7% of our customers have been impacted by this upgrade. To prevent further unintended upgrades, we have immediately blocked KB5044284 across all server group policies.”

  If you don’t have a patching tool, use one of the www.blockapatch.com tools to block that patch.  The good news is that inplace upgrades are supported on Server 2012r2 and higher.  The bad news is that you may not WANT to have upgraded to Server 2025 and now be in an unlicensed state.

  Windows Security KB5044284, Patch Lady Posts