RE: what we REALLY learned from WMF

["Adrian Marsden" <amarsden () jvsdet org>]

This is a silly post.... What are you trying to prove? That in some cases a company can test a patch quicker than in 
others?

MS understood the issue, promised a fix on their scheduled date and did better than expected.... So you criticise 
them....

Way to go.... Make it so they can never win.... then they won't bother... and we all know who suffers then....


-----Original Message-----
From:   Gadi Evron [mailto:ge () linuxbox org]
Sent:   Thu 1/5/2006 4:53 PM
To:     bugtraq () securityfocus com
Cc:     full-disclosure () lists grok org uk
Subject:        what we REALLY learned from WMF

What we really learn from this all WMF "thingie", is that when Microsoft 
wants to, it can.

Microsoft released the WMF patch ahead of schedule
( http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/181 )

Yep, THEY released the PATCH ahead of schedule.

What does that teach us?

There are a few options:
1. When Microsoft wants to, it can.

There was obviously pressure with this 0day, still — most damage out 
there from vulnerabilities is done AFTER Microsoft releases the patch 
and the vulnerability becomes public.

2. Microsoft decided to jump through a few QA tests this time, and 
release a patch.

Why should they be releasing BETA patches?
If they do, maybe they should release BETA patches more often, let those 
who want to - use them. It can probably also shorten the testing period 
considerably.
If this patch is not BETA, but things did just /happen/ to progress more 
swiftly.. than maybe we should re-visit option #1 above.

...

Maybe it’s just that we are used to sluggishness. Perhaps it is time we, 
as users and clients, started DEMANDING of Microsoft to push things up a 
notch.

...

Put in the necessary resources, and release patches within days of first 
discovery. I’m willing to live with weeks and months in comparison to 
the year+ that we have seen sometimes. Naturally some problems take 
longer to fix, but you get my drift.

It’s just like with false positives… as an industry we are now used to 
them. We don’t treat them as bugs, we treat them as an “acceptable level 
of”, as I heard Aviram mention a few times.

...

The rest is in my blog entry on the subject:
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/182

        Gadi.



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