Jordan didn’t sleep that night. He wrote a PowerShell script to pre-check for that specific orphaned process and kill it before the upgrade. He tested it 22 times. It worked.
The upgrade was a scar, not a badge. Jordan wrote a 47-page post-mortem. The CTO read it and approved funding for a proper endpoint management orchestration platform. The XP machine in the vault was finally retired and replaced with a modern IoT sensor.
They were ghosts.
He pushed the agent upgrade via the SEPM console. Click. Deploy.
For 47 minutes.
It’s always empty now.
When the machine came back, SEP was gone. No agent. No firewall. No antivirus. Just a naked Windows 10 box sitting on the financial network, wide open.
End of log.