Microsoft Issuing Unusual Out-of-Band Security Update 156
wiredmikey writes "In a rare move, Microsoft is breaking its normal procedures and will issue an emergency out-of-band security update on Thursday to address a hash collision attack vulnerability that came into the spotlight yesterday, and affects various Web platforms industry-wide. The vulnerability is not specific to Microsoft technologies and has been discovered to impact PHP 5, Java, .NET, and Google's v8, while PHP 4, Ruby, and Python are somewhat vulnerable. Microsoft plans to release the bulletin on December 29, 2011, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time, and said it would addresses security vulnerabilities in all supported releases of Microsoft Windows. 'The impact of this vulnerability is similar to other Denial of Service attacks that have been released in the past, such as the Slowloris DoS or the HTTP POST DoS,' said security expert Chris Eng. 'Unlike traditional DoS attacks, they could be conducted with very small amounts of bandwidth. This hash table multi-collision bug shares that property.'"
Patents could have saved us! (Score:3, Funny)
See, everyone here complains that patents are always causing trouble, forcing each developer to do something a little differently to avoid infringing on another patent. If the techniques used for parsing the hash tables had been patented, forcing each server developer to come up with their own unique implementation that didn't mimic the techniques of the others, then this whole situation might only have impacted one or two server technologies. Now, all of these different server technologies using similar implementations are all affected by this single type of attack. With all of the diversity that patents enforce, they could have prevented a single attack like this from affecting so many implementations at once!
[/sarcasm]
Re:Microsoft updates before Google and Oracle? (Score:5, Funny)