[montag813]

My company has dozens of computers, and we havent had a single incidence of virus or worm in the last 3 years. NOT ONE. Ignorant and lazy consumers and network managers are to blame if they are infected.

[FourPeas]

Ignorant and lazy consumers and network managers are to blame if they are infected.

Mr. FourPeas works for a company with thousands of computers in more countries than I care to count utilizing wireless, VPN, you-name-it. Almost every time, the virus or worm causes at least some problems. Ignorance and laziness is a part of it, but certainly not all. For the most part, even to large corporations, IT security is not that important. Budgets are small; influence is minimal; standards are a joke. Trying to design a complex network where everything works seemlessly is not a piece of cake. Verifying that current revs of anti-virus and firewalls are rolled out to thousands of computers in a timely fashion requires time, money, clout, sufficient policies, enforcement, etc. It's just not THAT simple.

[Knitebane]

Ignorant and lazy consumers and network managers are to blame if they are infected.

Lazy consumers? Perhaps.

Lazy network managers? Only the one's for very small sites.

Let's take Blaster, for example and a typical enterprise, say, about 1000 servers and 10,000 desktops.

Each of those servers runs applications. Not all the same application, sometimes a mix of different ones, sometimes single purpose apps, sometimes apps in standby for a disaster recovery situation.

Let's say that there are, conservatively, 1000 servers with 100 different apps running on them. Each server configuration must be patched and then tested before going into production. That requires that either you have an exact duplicate machine for each production machine (which is prohibitively expensive both in hardware and Windows licensing costs) or you have a few machines that you can format, install Windows, install and configure the software, install the patch and test.

That means formating, installing and testing around between 100 and 500 servers in order to test every configuration. And that doesn't include testing every desktop configuration too.

Considering that a typical install evolution consisting of Windows, application and system configuration can take around 2 hours per server, plus add on a 24 hour window to let the machine run (during which time the machine can't be formated and move on to the next test platform) it's not unusual to require 3 to 6 months to test all servers and then patch them once a patch has shipped.

Blaster gave them about three weeks.