About the Author
My name is Kevin A. Thompson, I am an intellectual property attorney in Chicago, Illinois with the firm Davis McGrath LLC. I practice in the areas of domestic and international trademark, copyright, and internet issues. Internet law is my real love, especially how trademarks and copyrights intersect there. The focus of this blog is the digital world, its impact and legal framework. I write about recent issues, cases, and controversies. I also give my general thoughts about the Internet and its impact upon us and our society.
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Microsoft: Damned if you do.
The patches that Microsoft released for a security flaw are partly to blame for the recent Zotob virus outbreak. As noted in many places, among them being This Week in Tech, hackers reverse engineered the patches to determine exactly where the security flaw was and released the Zotob virus within *THREE DAYS*.
Microsoft is damned if they don’t release security patches, because then if the flaw is discovered later by independent third parties and evidence comes out that Microsoft knew about it, itd be a Plaintiff lawyer’s field day.
At the same time, they are damned if they do. Three days is not enough time for many large companies to roll out security patches since the patches need to be tested carefully. If the patch breaks word processing applications for an entire international company, heads will roll in the IT department. Yet if hackers release another virus like Zotob but which is more troublesome, IT departments will be forced to roll out patches much sooner than they want to.
Microsoft, as the source of the patch, is damned either way.
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