Well then, now that we've all been re-hired by TweakTown in the wake of the early April bartending mishap, I'd better get some news posted!

Microsoft and Security: A phrase that some may consider to be a bit of an oxymoron. Just how much of one we might never have known, had the folks at Forrester Research not decided to find out. The results probably aren't all that surprising to most of us, but I'm sure Microsoft got a bit of a shock!

Three-fourths of software security experts at major companies do not believe Microsoft's products are secure... While 77 percent of respondents said security was a top concern when using Windows, 89 percent still use the software for sensitive applications, Forrester said Monday in a report titled "Can Microsoft Be Secure?"

 

In the most dramatic incidents, such as the Nimda and SQL Slammer worms that exploited holes in Microsoft software, patches were available from the Redmond, Wash.-based company well before the attacks happened. In many cases, however, the patches were not implemented by system administrators and engineers.

 

Koetzle noted that while Microsoft's patches for the last nine high-profile Windows security holes predated such attacks by an average of 305 days, too few customers applied the fixes because "administrators lacked both the confidence that a patch won't bring down a production system and the tools and time to validate Microsoft's avalanche of patches."