Monday, June 15, 2009

Ye Ole Virus Fighter

We've been struggling for nearly a week. Slugging it out with a worm. An old one. One that should never have caused us to so much as blink. Let alone force dozens of us to take up arms against.

If we'd done our jobs correctly. If we'd tested our plans rather than patting ourselves on the back and presuming we'd be safe. Instead, an unpatched laptop gets infected in the wild and carries its payload behind our corporate firewalls. And the siege begins.

Our POS (Point Of Sale) systems weren't patched. Some obscure, all-but-forgotten PCs weren't patched. And other systems not connected to the domain were unpatched. The virus owns them now. We can clean all of them. But down-version systems which can not be wrapped in the latest service pack will get infected again. Sometimes in a manner of minutes. Almost always less than an hour.

Day after day we fight the virus. I hear its laughter.

1 comment:

Josh Reed said...

Think of it this way - it's now discovered all your legacy systems that you had no idea existed. Think of it as an auto-discovery tool