Re: A funny (but real) story for XMAS

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 05:03:58 PST, Christopher Parker said:

> CERT sucks? Humm... In my UNIX & Security college course, we're being told CERT is a great
> resource for security-related information. Can anybody else make a comment on this? Agree?
> Disagree?

What they teach you in college about the way the world works is almost never
applicable to reality.

The biggest problem with CERT is that their advisories often take 3 weeks short
of forever to come out, especially for a bug that applies across multiple
vendors.  This is because CERT doesn't announce till the vendors have patches
ready to roll.

This of course sucks if there's an exploit on the loose.

This of course sucks if you're a vendor who gets a patch ready quickly and ends
up having to coordinate with a vendor who takes 3 years to get one out the
door.

Other than the fact that sometimes their policies and criteria sometimes work
against their goals, there's nothing wrong with CERT.  You can be sure that
anything they actually publish is solid and researched and an actual report of
an actual hole, with actual fixes.

This doesn't help if you got 0wned by the hole 4 months before.

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