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Presidential advisor slams software security

Feb 26, 2004 12:41AM PST

Software makers could eliminate most current security issues if they only tried harder, according to a Homeland Security advisor

An advisor to the US' Homeland Security Council has lashed out at software developers, arguing their failure to deliver secure code is responsible for most security threats.

Retired lieutenant general John Gordon, presidential assistant and advisor to the Homeland Security Council, used his keynote address at the RSA Security conference in San Francisco on Wednesday to question how much effort developers are putting into ensuring their code is watertight. "This is a problem for every company that writes software. It cannot be beyond our ability to learn how to write and distribute software with much higher standards of care and much reduced rate of errors and much reduced set of vulnerabilities," he said.

Gordon's keynote followed a day after that of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

According to Gordon, if developers could reduce the error and vulnerability rate by a factor of 10, it would "probably eliminate something like 90 percent of the current security threats and vulnerabilities.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/0,39020645,39147413,00.htm

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