Stan Beer
Monday, 25 September 2006 12:34
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
The appearance of a zero day exploit for the critical VML (Vector Markup Language) vulnerability that has been found to affect not only Internet Explorer but also Office 2003 and Outlook HTML emails has prompted third party security professionals to develop immediate fixes. Microsoft, which expects its users to wait until October 10 for an official patch, is strangely petulant but it cannot afford to be.
So far, only a few websites have been
discovered that exploit the vulnerability in Internet Explorer.
However, the timely response by a globally dispersed group of security
specialists calling itself ZERT (Zero Day Emergency Response Team),
will be welcomed by many users who may feel being forced to wait nearly
three weeks for an official Microsoft fix is just too long.
To be sure, most users will welcome the fix that arrives from Microsoft
on Patch Tuesday. However, until then they want to protect themselves
with every measure at their disposal.
For its part, Microsoft should do everything in its power to help its
users protect themselves from exploits of vulnerabilities in its
software. That includes working together with third party security
suppliers.
