News Microsoft plans new PC fortifications

From New Scientist:

Microsoft has announced a new security drive designed to provide better protection for personal computers against worms and hackers.

The world's largest software maker has admitted that its current policies are not enough to stop the spread of malicious computer code, such as the recent SoBig and Blaster worms.

A key initiative will see the company change its strategy for releasing code fixes. These software patches will be released monthly rather than weekly, as is the case currently. This is to provide less opportunity for hackers to study the patches in order to attack Microsoft-powered computers.

Stuart Oaken, chief security officer for Microsoft in the UK, says virus writers and hackers will typically get hold of a patch and reverse engineer it in order to find vulnerability. "If we can reduce [releases] to 12 a year as opposed of 52 times a year it is better." Oaken told New Scientist.

Full story here

How is this supposed to be better? Surely by reducing the number of fixes, you give a longer period of time between the releases for malicious types to exploit the flaw?

Better QA before the code was released in the first place would be a better bet, Stu....

 

Well there will always be hackers. And Microsoft will always be targeted..............