If we had everything in ansible it would be 5 minutes

Ansible at the day-job takes about 45 min to do a patch. As someone who's used a fair number of alternatives, maybe consider anything else on the planet?

But, seriously. The response to this particular sploit wasn't really "config management"-y. It was a simple process that cron generally handled anyway, and network segregation and firewalling allowed us to prioritize easily. My worry is that there are some core architectural decisions you may need to revisit in the post-mortem on this, because there may be some fundamental changes required to get sensible wins in the future.

(If you're on containers, I weep for your validation challenges; also, get bazel)