Put yourself in the shoes of a IT Infrastructure manager, what will be your response ? You can select more than one choice.
- Panic.
- Continue to chit chat.
- Believe that your last anti-virus upgrade had covered all machines.
- Blindly trust that the sales pitch from your anti-virus vendor that the anti-virus is a prevent-all and cure-all which will also solve the world's crisis.
- Say "Trust me", turn around and call the anti-virus vendor to log a case, and start a anti-virus scan on a server with 20 users connected.
- Spend 15 minutes to draft an email to tell users that "we are sorry but we need to shut your favorite server down".
- Question whether will the virus spread when it did with a big bang less than a week ago.
- Refuse to disconnect the server because "I will not have remote console access to it".
- Backed with many years of Unix environment experience in a bank, decided that the Windows engineer recommendations to contain the virus was nonsense. (*Hint* Unix doesn't suffer from virus attacks)
- Refuse to install the only patch known to fix a vulnerability exploited by the virus because it is "a untested patch" when the situation is, without the patch, the whole network and all servers are not usable.
- Expect to see up a nicely drafted plan which will take hours to craft if you can get the relevant people together in time before taking any action.
- Call a debriefing with security experts and walk out because it's lunch time.
- Using phases like "didn't like your attitude", "you want to do things this way?" and "is this the way you do things?", rejecting all recommendations from the Windows engineer without coming up with any suggestions or plan,
- Yanking out the network cables to isolate the problem is too drastic.
- Killing the WAN link at the first hint of a major virus out break without spending time to analyse is not right.
- Repeating the same mistake again in less than a week.
If you had selected none of the options, you are an IT engineer like me.
