Getting the basic installation right could boost the security of users' IT systems significantly, said Davidson at the OracleWorld conference in San Francisco.

“We certainly make products secure by default, yet there is still way too much manual configuration customers have to do to secure their systems,” she said.

As business users struggle to cope with the spate of worms, viruses and hacking, the damage caused by malicious attacks could be minimised if software was set to the highest level of security when it was installed.

“My biggest fear is that something we fail to do will create a problem for customers,” Davidson told Computer Weekly.

Oracle now runs a standard software development processes for creating not just the Oracle database, but also its applications suite. Within that, “We have release criteria for all our products and support tools to ascertain security worthiness,” she said.

[ Read more ]