frixion, who now holds down a steady and respectable job in public sector IT, said that the sheer volume of patches that need applying in order to close the vulnerabilities that are exposed in equally worrying volumes are a headache for administrators.

"Take your standard Windows install for example, you need to apply dozens of patches as soon as you install it to make it even half secure. I’ve just taken a look at the content directory on our Microsoft Software Update Services server here at work and there are over 600Mb of security updates, some critical. Granted they’re not all pertinent to a particular system, but it gives you a good idea," he wrote in an e-mail.

And there are still plenty of familiar and common system vulnerabilities that are easily exploitable by both experienced and inexperienced hackers using freely available source code and tools on the internet, he said.

[ Read more ]

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