Making matters worse, BC students are approaching final exam period. The Sasser outbreak prompted a run on the student computer center Saturday, with panicked students worried about the welfare of term projects and other materials on Sasser-infected machines, he said.
Other schools also faced large-scale outbreaks, including more than 1,000 machines at Boston University, according to a source.
Among leading financial services companies, the impact of Sasser was generally light. Companies including Citibank Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. had around a dozen Sasser infections, rather than hundreds or thousands of systems infections, according to a source.
Microsoft's recent decision to move from weekly to monthly software patches has raised the stakes for companies that ignore the security bulletins and updates, said Firas Raouf, chief operating officer of eEye Digital Security Inc., which discovered the LSASS vulnerability.
"Now you have a handful of vulnerabilities that are addressed by a single patch, so if you don't deploy a patch, you're opened four or five doors to your network," he said.
Large companies are often reluctant to press software patches into service out of fear they will break critical applications used by employees or customers. However, waiting too long to apply a software patch exposes companies to infection by a worm or virus that takes advantage of the software hole fixed by the patch, Raouf said.
The most important thing is for organizations to have a process in place to handle new vulnerabilities when they are revealed so that they can act quickly to scan for vulnerable machines, test patches, deploy patches or apply workarounds as needed, he said.
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