Sasser strikes!
Today, I’ve been witness to the devastation that a virus can wreck on a computer network. I’ve heard and read stories, but had never seen one in action (at least of this magnitude).
1415 hours Malaysian time - Sasser struck and my company’s network went down—most of it. Poof! Every one of my colleagues’ machines started shutting down and rebooting in cycles and the entire department was forced shutdown for damage control. Hours of work lost, with possible file corruptions.
More than anything else, I am amazed at the deployment and speed of its payload - in bringing down a whole network of computers (we have 1200+) - it’s not just plain hatred & butterfies in the tummy, it’s awesome, incredulous and devastating!
What if my company was in airline logistics, defense or in life-support systems? What kind of havoc that would have caused? Would you like to fly when worms like Sasser go loose over corporate networks - demolishing every form of defense systems that we think we have.
This is not meant to be a punch but, miraculously, my machine wasn’t affected. I realized that I had patched my machine of all critical updates just a fortnight ago. That’s a hard lesson learnt by our IT staff today, i.e., not having an internet connection is NOT a reason not to update patches.