1 In 3 Windows PCs Still Vulnerable To Worm Attack

CWmike writes "The worm that has infected several million Windows PCs, Downadup or 'Conficker,' is having a field day because nearly a third of all systems remain unpatched 80 days after Microsoft rolled out an emergency fix, security firm Qualys said. Downadup surged dramatically this week and has infected an estimated 3.5 million PCs so far, according to Finnish security company F-Secure Corp. The worm exploits a bug in the Windows Server service used in Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008. Qualys' CTO said, 'These slow [corporate] patch cycles are simply not acceptable. They lead directly to these high infection rates.'" This is indicative of why some are calling for Microsoft to rethink Patch Tuesday, as reader buzzardsbay pointed out.

Comments

Genuine Advantage Validation

[RichMan]

I know a lot of people who are afraid of updates because of the genuine advantage validation. They got student priced versions of the software 5 years ago and are no longer students. They don't want to risk losing Visio/Word/PowerPoint or having some other software disabled on their computer.

The fear factor of automated reporting/validation is stopping a lot of people from running the updates.