Second zero-day Excel flaw emerges

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I'll tell you why...

Why is it, so incredibly hard for MS to completely patch
s/w that is so commonly used in the business world and so much $$$$ of the users are at stake?

Yet a 2nd critical excel flaw out on the heels of all patches, corrections, and other futile efforts to correct the incorrigible beast Redmond uleashed ....

It's really rather simple. When you write a bit of code to do something AND you're on a deadline, what do you think your first priority is going to be? Is it to make the bit of code work correctly under most normal circumstances? Or is it going to worry about how some ********* of a criminal schmuck is going to take that feature and make it do something OTHER than it was originally intended?

Are you going to even start worrying about ways that someone could take a feature and exploit it?

Probably NOT. More often than not you're not going to worry about it. Chances are you're a programmer that's working as part of a TEAM. Your team works on writing code that interacts with code that OTHER teams are working on.

And while there's some overseers who check the results of the code, chances are rather good that if it works and it looks like it's not going to blow chunks, chances are they won't be giving it too much of a second thought.

And then there's the underlying TOOLS that are being used to write the code itself that could have flaws. Consider that most of Office and other commonly available programs are written in some flavor of C and/or C++. Where's the tools in C++ that stop programmers from creating code that could be exploited by a buffer overload?

It's NOT just MS Visual C++ either. Other tools likewise have that shortcoming. Of course, if the language itself was tweaked, then we'd hear all the moaning and groaning that the language was changed and no longer was "pure..."

As far as Windows users being masochists.. Sorry. I don't think so. My computer works just fine and is virus and malware free. I don't do stupid things like open strange files from strangers. I only open stuff after I've let my antivirus gave it a full scan and is determined to be safe.

On occasion, we do find that someone did something blatantly stupid and opened up something because the social engineering was just TOO tempting. Ok.. It's not quite the epidemic you make it out to be. The Chicken Little attitude just don't cut it. The sky is NOT falling. Get over it.

Posted by: Wolfie2K3   Posted on: 06/20/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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