On Fri, 2003-01-31 at 10:44, Ron DuFresne wrote: > > As mentioned in another list, all this trouble M$ folks have with > patching, and indeed it seems a carzy mess in the windows world, whence > various badly compiled patches will back you out of fixes from the privous > patch, as well as the issues of what thrid party software might do the > same as well as make you open to a potential vuln you weren't subject to > prior, sheesh the list goes one, we need to pity these porr windows > admins. Russ Cooper had a few posts in ntbugtraq outlining the complexity > with just the windows base OS upgrades, let alone 3rd party stuff...
Here's a good example. We recently purchased HEAT (a Help Desk - call tracking product) and installed it on a Windows 2000 Server running SQL (required for HEAT.) During the Slammer mess, the box went down, and it hasn't been back up since. We *thought* it was due to Slammer, but further investigation revealed that one of our admins had patched the box on Friday - before Slammer hit us - and the *patch* is what took the server down. (The Windows OS is still working, but HEAT is not.) Backing the patches out didn't do a thing, so now we have to return all the way to SP2, reinstall HEAT and then patch back to the level right *before* the one that took it down. You can just imagine how thrilled the admins are to have to do that - and the next time they have to patch that box, they'll be real leery about doing it. And these are admins who are *very* conscientious about patching and *very* aware of security issues. Multiply this times 500,000 similar situations worldwide and you have a rudimentary grasp of the problem. -- Paul Schmehl ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Adjunct Information Security Officer The University of Texas at Dallas http://www.utdallas.edu/~pauls/ AVIEN Founding Member _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
