Today I was behind my computer when I received tweets about a severe vulnerability in Microsoft Office Web Components. Although it did not apply to me ( I am not using internet explorer, actually most of the time I am not even using windows ), I figured I had loved this way of information exchange when I was a network/system administrator in a previous job.
In a fairly big network it would have been plausible that every few hours a PC would be infected due to this vulnerability. So the faster the problem is known, the less damage could have been done to the client machines.
I can recommend any system/network administrator to sign-up for a twitter account and follow some security related persons / groups. Reading tweets costs time, but it will spare you time when something bad is on the loose.
These machine are an easy target for groups of hackers who want to form a botnet and can then be used to perform the DoS attack. Of course, those hackers could be in service of some government, but I highly doubt that.