Earlier in the week Microsoft announced patches for 14 newly discovered Windows vulnerabilities, one Exchange vulnerability, one in MSN Messenger, and two in Word, and invited all of its customers to install these latest patches at their earliest convenience.
For some, that is only a matter of hours. According to Gerhard Eschelbeck, CTO of vulnerability-management vendor Qualys, his company would be pushing out a set of detection signatures for the Microsoft patches within just three or four hours of the Microsoft announcement.
He said the use of its secure operations centers to push signatures automatically to every device installed by all its 1,500 QualysGuard subscribers is the best way for enterprise customers to track and prioritize scanning and patching, and manage their security policies effectively on a global scale.
Jeroen Roodnat, of intrusion-prevention vendor TippingPoint Technologies said its security filters, known as Virtual Software Patches, are distributed to customers in real time after testing for accuracy and performance. We believe our approach of customized purpose-built hardware appliances means we can be faster than anyone else, and can provide more coverage than anyone else, he said.
The company’s Digital Vaccine subscription service supplies pre-emptive vulnerability filters automatically to its line of security appliances. Our filters go out with recommended block or disable settings so that switching on a filter will not limit the performance of a network or impact on a business application, said Roodnat.
TippingPoint recently added spyware protection to its UnityOne security devices, and shipped a peer-to-peer management mode as an optional software upgrade across the whole UnityOne catalog.
