The Costs of Patching

prestidigital writes "vnunet has a brief but interesting article in which Craig Fiebig, general manager of Microsoft's security business unit, is quoted as saying "In dollar terms, patching is the most expensive security measures and keeping your antivirus descriptions up to date is the least." That seems like an important statement coming from a company who's patches are possibly responsible for 45% of traffic on some networks."

Comments

Say it ain't so!

[RealAlaskan]

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

That's what I do, and I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Things get fixed, usually before I ever knew they were broken, deamons get restarted, nothing gets interrupted, life goes on ... If I took the trouble to make it a cron job, I'd never even know.

... Craig Fiebig, ... is quoted as saying "In dollar terms, patching is the most expensive security measures ...

Is Mr Fiebig telling us that things don't go so smoothly if you use MS products? Or that MS can't keep up with a bunch of amatures? Do MS patches break non-MS apps? Could all this be why so many worms and viruses manage to spread across unpatched MS products? Could it be that MS patches are as bad as the bugs they fix? SAY IT AIN'T SO, CRAIG!