Vole moves on ASP.net bug

WHILE Microsoft can take up to six months to sew a patch on other parts of Windows XP, it seems to have moved faster than SpaceShip One when it came to fixing the ASP.net bug.

The announcement of the two patches caught many Vole watchers by surprise as the flaw had only been revealed a couple of weeks ago and indeed many of us thought it was probably not that important.

However Vole's surprising haste in fixing the problem has lead IT journalists to look at the figures to see how many would be affected.

Security outfit Netcraft says that there are 2.9 million active ASP.Net sites on the Internet. This would imply that there are a lot of servers out there which could be affected.

However, most of them do not have authenticated pages and are therefore not vulnerable to the bug. What are left would be developer systems, perhaps a smattering of test sites. Nothing to see here move along please.

But what is left must be companies who have critical e-commerce and other such sites, and their privileged pages are vulnerable to unauthorized access. In other words serious money is involved here. Perhaps this was why Vole bent over backwards to fix the bug?

Answers on the back of a postcard please to Confused@Inq. Vole, it's a marchitectural thing.