Ultimately, of course, the blame might be placed at the feet of Microsoft, as the DCOM RPC vulnerability was of the making of their programmers. But the fact is that even programmers from Microsoft are human and as such may occasionally overlook the odd buffer overflow here and there.
v As the disclaimer that you agreed to before using any software from Microsoft (including patches) helpfully points out, their software may or may not be fit for purpose, regardless of whether you use it to run your organisation's critical financial database, drive control systems to move control rods around in a nuclear reactor, or simply e-mail friends, relatives and people you stumbled across on Friends Reunited. So the fact is that software vulnerabilities will be found, patches to fix them will be issued, and in order to maintain the security and integrity of your system, you will need to promptly apply them.However, an organisation's patch management strategy will not be cheap, and requires test systems, procedures, change management and back-out plans. It will require resources, including personnel and investment in training. It may even require dedicated servers to provide software updates to other servers and workstations. In short, it requires investment, and with it recognition from budget holders within companies that patch management is important and essential enough to be taken seriously, and be a distinct and recognized element of the system administrator's job role. Given the financial damage incurred from cleaning up after a virus outbreak with an organization, proactive patch management should be considered a sound business investment with real, tangible benefits.
The home user is equally at risk from viruses, but patch management presents an entirely different set of problems. Running Windows Update and then downloading megabytes of patches over a dial-up connection for hours is likely to cause frustration, from both the downloader and their partner who would really like to use the phone. Broadband users are in a better position in this respect, but since the network connection is "always on", the temptation is to leave the computer "always on" as well, thus rendering it "always vulnerable". The solution (for both dial-up and broadband home users) is to employ a firewall solution to block incoming traffic originating from the Internet, deployed as a separate hardware or software solution, or with appropriate port filtering. With, of course, anti-virus software with recent virus definitions.Patch management will, in the end, save you time and money. The malicious software writers are already hard at work on copy-cat versions of the current viruses and worms, no doubt aimed to cause much more damage, and probably working hard at exploiting the next generation of vulnerabilities. Next time, blaster may be set to kill.