According to a report on Silicon.com, Microsoft's chief security
strategist, Scott Charney, made the statement at the TechEd 2003
conference in Brisbane. He said that Microsoft's reporting arm,
called Dr Watson, had collected data showing that "half of all
crashes in Windows are caused not by Microsoft code but third-party
code".
Charney was explaining the extensive checks that are carried out
upon its own coding before placing it onto the market, including
close scrutiny of the work of individual developers and the systems
they use, said Silicon.
Unfortunately for Charney, crashes in Windows increased as a
worm known as MSBlast, LoveSan or Blaster – began infecting
computers on Monday, and spread rapidly over the internet.
The worm, which had been widely anticipated and the subject of
warnings from both Microsoft and the US Department of Homeland
Security, targets computers vulnerable through a flaw in
Microsoft's Windows operating system. A patch was developed and
made available by Microsoft on the same day as the flaw was
revealed, but many computer users have still not made use of
it.
While not the biggest or most serious virus seen by the
industry, Blaster is self-propagating, and this means that it could
be around for a while. As well as crashing infected computers and
systems, the worm will also use those machines to scan the internet
for other vulnerable computers to infect.
In addition the worm is programmed to launch a denial of service
attack where a web site is overloaded to the point of
collapse at
windowsupdate.com – on 16th August, and the 16th of every month
thereafter.
