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General discussion

Microsoft happy with progress in securing products

Feb 19, 2004 11:36PM PST

The past two or three weeks have been pretty bad ones for Microsoft but the operations manager of the company's security response centre believes that it is following the right road to making its products secure.

Iain Mulholland said security could not be ensured overnight and, as proof of progress which the Trustworthy Computing Initiative, set in place by the company's co-founder Bill Gates, had made, he pointed to the fact that Windows Server 2003 has had less vulnerabilities than Windows Server 2000 in a comparable period.

He defended the time which the company takes to release patches for vulnerabilities - most recently, 200 days were taken to patch a vulnerability in Abstract Syntax Notation One, a language which defines the way data is sent across dissimilar communication systems - by saying that the quality of the patch had to be ensured.

Any patch had to be tested against at least 1000 applications as there were that many that were being run by various businesses on its operating systems, Mulholland said.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/20/1077072833190.html

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