On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 12:29:30 MDT, Irwin Lazar <ILazar@burtongroup.com> said:
I'm trying here to gauge the length of time before this vulnerability is closed out.
The core routers have been bouncing as they upgrade all this week. A lot of places will be putting the fixes in place during windows this weekend. And some 30% of the routers won't ever get upgraded. We're going to be finding vulnerable routers on eBay for years. See Eric Rescorla's paper on how fast the OpenSSL vulnerabilities of a while ago were actually fixed: To: BugTraq Subject: Security holes... Who cares? Date: Nov 15 2002 6:30PM Author: Eric Rescorla <ekr rtfm com> Message-ID: <200211151830.gAFIUr751517@sierra.rtfm.com> I'd like to announce the availability for downlaod of the following paper. Security holes... Who cares? Eric Rescorla RTFM, Inc. <http://www.rtfm.com/> We report on an observational study of user response following the OpenSSL remote buffer overflows of July 2002 and the worm that exploited it in September 2002. Immediately after the publication of the bug and its subsequent fix we identified a set of vulnerable servers. In the weeks that followed we regularly probed each server to determine whether it had applied one of the relevant fixes. We report two primary results. First, we find that administrators are generally very slow to apply the fixes. Two weeks after the bug announcement, more than two thirds of servers were still vulnerable. Second, we identify several weak predictors of user response and find that the pattern differs in the period following the release of the bug and that following the release of the worm. The paper can be downloaded from: http://www.rtfm.com/upgrade.pdf http://www.rtfm.com/upgrade.ps