In 2003, my boss was of the opinion “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I had pushed to get some sort of patch management solution in place – this was 2003, so it was pre-WSUS. At the time, not being completely updated didn’t really scare anyone (well, not in my company) – that, and we had no budget allocated for this. Needless to say, I was getting burned out writing “patch” scripts…
Then Blaster hit. We were running around with our heads cut off. Me? I was writing retaliatory scripts (which weren’t very successful) to apply the proper fix that had been out for a month.
The ironic bit? The IT director was overseas in a meeting, bragging about how our scripted solutions were keeping the entire LAN in check at precisely the time when they got word the entire (all 60+ sites) North American operation was offline because of the MSBlaster virus.
Whoops.