Patch Tuesday
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Patch Tuesday is the second Tuesday of each month, the day on which Microsoft releases security patches.
Starting with Windows 98, Microsoft included a "Windows Update" system, that would check for patches to Windows and its components which Microsoft would release intermittently. This system has since been upgraded to also check for updates to other Microsoft products, including Office.
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[edit] Patch deployment costs
The Windows Update system suffered from two problems, affecting opposite ends of the users scale. On the one hand, less experienced users were not aware of it, and did not run it. Microsoft's solution was to introduce the concept of "Automatic Update", which would pro-actively inform the user that an update was available for its system.
The second problem affected large deployments of Windows, such as can be found at large companies. Such large deployments found it increasingly difficult to make sure all systems across the company were all up to date. The problem was made worse by the fact that, occasionally, a patch issued by Microsoft would break existing functionality, and would have to be uninstalled.
In order to reduce the costs related to the deployment of patches, Microsoft introduced the concept of Patch Tuesday. The idea is that security patches are accumulated over a period of one month, and then dispatched all at once on an anticipated date which system administrators can prepare for. This date was set not too close to the beginning of the week, and yet far enough from the end of the week to allow any problems that may arise to be resolved before the weekend. System administrators can mark the second Tuesday of the month in advance as the "day in which machines are updated", and plan accordingly. The name "Patch Tuesday" has been in use since the third quarter of 2004. It is becoming synonymous for the day any software vendor issues a vulnerability patch. Some editors/analysts are even talking about Hack Wednesday as the day after, when hackers can launch attacks against the announced vulnerabilities.
[edit] Security implications of Patch Tuesday
The most obvious security implication is that security problems that have a solution are withheld from the public for a period of up to a month. Implicitly, this policy assumes that most attacks use information reverse engineered from the security patches that fix the vulnerability, rather than true zero day exploits. It is unknown to what extent this assumption is true.
In the past, there were some cases where either vulnerability information or actual worms were released to the public a day or two before patch Tuesday. This does not leave Microsoft enough time to incorporate a fix for said vulnerabilities, and thus, theoretically, leave a one month window for attackers or the worm to exploit the hole, before a patch is available to formally fix it. This phenomenon is unrelated to Exploit Wednesday[citation needed].
[edit] Strictness of schedule
In most months Microsoft sticks to the "one patch set per month" schedule, and patches are only released on Patch Tuesday. However, cases in which out of cycle patches are released are not rare, and happen, on average, several times a year.
Critics say that the correlation between the vulnerabilities that cause Microsoft to break the promised schedule and the severity of those vulnerabilities is not high enough. There have been cases where vulnerabilities deemed by many to be "highly critical", and that were actively being exploited by worms, were not issued out of cycle patches while vulnerabilities deemed by same parties less critical were.[citation needed]
[edit] Exploit Wednesday
Many exploits are seen shortly after the release of a patch. By analyzing the patch, exploit developers can more easily figure out how to exploit the underlying vulnerability. Therefore the term "Exploit Wednesday" was coined. [1] Also, starting to abuse an exploit on this day gives you the longest time before a fix is supplied to users.
[edit] References
- Evers, Joris. "Microsoft pulls 'critical' Windows update", CNET News.com, 2005-09-09. Retrieved on December 12, 2006.
- Security updates. Microsoft (2006-11-14). Retrieved on December 12, 2006.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Microsoft: Bulletins and Advisories
- Microsoft Support Website
- Bruce Schneier's blog - Example of report about vulnerability found in the wild with timing seemingly coordinated with "Patch Tuesday".
- Bruce Schneier's blog - Example of a quick patch response, not due to a security issue but for DRM-related reasons.
