[thelist] FYI - Plug this MS Application Hole

[Scott Harman]

I've just trashed my last two cleverly crafted paras to simply say this:
It's simply too easy for media and critics alike to jump on the anti-ms
bandwagon whenever flaws occur or are exploited.

Take Slammer for example - the patch had been released some time before
the worm.  In the course of making the advisory, Microsoft made the
mechanism known.  The only people to be infected, were the unpatched.
It's quite rare that an exploit is used before a patch is made available
(RPC flaw anyone?)

Everyone has heard about the viruses that have infected millions of
machines, costing trillions of dollars... Blah blah blah... Fine.
Serious flaws here people... However the most seriously flawed parts of
the process are the users themselves.  From memory there are only a
couple of virii that can infect simply from viewing the content of an
e-mail (rather than double-clicking an attachment) but they didn't have
a huge impact.  Microsoft turned around and released a couple of
patches, and placed execution restrictions on html/active-x/java running
in a preview pane.

It's all about critical mass as Jason's said.  I'd wager that everyone
on this list knows all about the various apache and tomcat flaws and
security holes - but your average end user will never hear of them.

Like any large software release, bugs will be introduced (or as I like
to say, Hidden Features)  How many patches have I downloaded for XP - 70
or 80... How many for Mandrake 9... Last count - 300.  I'm not even
going to go into Macs - I use mine in the office too infrequently to
notice if it needs patching or not.

Just my 2p ;)
-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Handby [mailto:jasonh at corestar.co.uk] 
Sent: 04 September 2003 15:52
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: RE: [thelist] FYI - Plug this MS Application Hole


> > Do you think that Microsoft products have so many
> > security problems because they develop sub-par products, or because 
> > the various flavours of Windows are the most commonly used OS, and 
> > therefore come under more attack by "crackers"?

I think there's some truth in that. I expect you need to have a pretty
large population of networked machines running platform X to achieve the
sort of "critical mass" that will allow a worm written for platform X to
really take off. And, right now, that platform is Windows.


> > (I hope this doesn't start a flame war, I am just looking for some 
> > informed opinions on this subject.)
>
> This definitely is a flame war discussion. I'm not sure that a 
> meaningful discussion about this can be had on theList.

I'd tend to agree. I appreciate that Sarah's intention was not to start
a flame war, but I bet there are hundreds of people out there who are
sitting on their fingers and trying really hard not to be goaded into a
reply right now...!



J

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