Microsoft Security Report Points Fingers at ISVs
The overall number of Windows security holes has declined in the last year by 8.4 percent to about 2,500 vulnerabilities, according to a new Microsoft report.
For a big target like Microsoft, that's good news. It's one of the findings in the eighth edition of Microsoft's "Security Intelligence Report," published Monday, which draws its data mostly from the second half of 2009. The report, which also tracks vulnerabilities in third-party software, can be downloaded here.
The bad news: almost to a person security experts are saying that it's time for independent software vendors (ISVs) who leverage Windows components to step up their own security strategies. And Microsoft thinks so too. Newer Windows operating systems are less vulnerable to attack. Instead, hacker and botnet attacks have shifted toward targeting third-party programs and utilities running on Windows.
