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Time to End Microsoft's Patch Tuesday?

Posted by Zonk on from the plenty-of-time-for-trickery dept.

buzzardsbay writes "Techtarget's resident security curmudgeon, Dennis Fisher, is calling for an end to Microsoft's monthly security patching cycle. Fisher points out that 'a hacker only needs one unpatched system, one little crack in the fence in order to launch a major attack on a given network. The sheer volume of the patches Microsoft releases each month makes it quite difficult for even the most conscientious IT department to get every patch out to all of the affected systems in a reasonable amount of time.'"

2 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. I have always wondered... by AxemRed · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why don't they just release patches as the make them? Is there a specific reason that they hold them all until "patch Tuesday?"

    1. Re:I have always wondered... by edwdig · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Does Windows gracefully handle the situation where a DLL which is currently in use is replaced, or will I wind up with applications calling two different versions of the DLL depending on when they started?

      The reason Windows updates require reboots is because open files cannot be replaced. So if a DLL is in use at the time of update, it won't actually be installed until you reboot.

      Unix systems, otoh, have decided that the name of a file (the thing the user has control over) is not what actually ids a file, but instead the location on disk is the id. Hence why Unix updates don't require reboots and instead result in the problems you've mentioned.

      I've always wondered how someone could consider the Unix design a good idea. Two different programs can open what they think is the same file, yet get completely different results. And yet some people don't seem to get why this is a really bad thing for shared libraries (or even files in general).