Fear and hype helps Windows users patch fast
It's the publicity around zero-day bugs that drive Windows users to patch their software quickly, not the fact that Microsoft sounds the alarm by issuing an emergency update, a researcher said today.
Windows users rush to patch whenever a zero-day vulnerability is involved, even when Microsoft doesn't deliver the fix in an out-of-band update, said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys, a California-based security risk and compliance management provider.
Kandek analyzed data acquired from several hundred thousand PCs that Qualys monitors for its customers, and concluded that the existence of a zero-day bug -- a vulnerability for which exploit code has gone public before a fix is ready -- is the driver for faster patching. He found that the patching speed of two Microsoft updates that addressed zero-days in Internet Explorer were nearly identical, even though one had been released as part of the company's standard Patch Tuesday, and the other was issued as an out-of-band update.
