21 Quotes by Alan Paller

Microsoft's delay is inexcusable. There's no excuse other than incompetence and negligence.

We have made enormous progress over the past five years by forcing the vendors to deliver automated patching. Now the bad guys are saying: 'You did that, now we're going after the applications.' Now we have to start all over again.

It would have been terrible (without the widespread patching). That got a lot of systems fixed.

The bottom line is that security has been set back nearly six years in the past 18 months. Six years ago, attackers targeted operating systems and the operating system vendors didn't do automated patching. In the intervening years, automated patching protected everyone from government to grandma. Now the attackers are targeting popular applications, and the vendors of those applications do not do automated patching.

This illustrates that even technologically savvy people have a hard time fighting off denial of service attacks.

American corporations are being riddled by (computer) attacks ? they are being defended very badly.

It wasn't just a bunch of paid consultants.

Data I have says that 20% of the Internet is vulnerable to this, and that's a huge, huge percentage of the BIND servers, ... no reason why it won't skip to other Unix versions.

It's something we call collateral damage, but I don't mean that lightly. This thing creates traffic inside a subnet, creates traffic in addition to what comes in from the outside.