Economist.com | Internet security

The Economist has a long article about Information Security. It is worth reading

Fighting the worms of mass destruction
WHEN Microsoft released its latest monthly batch of software patches on November 11th, it included one designed to repair a previously unknown flaw in Windows 2000. Such an event often acts as a tip-off to the writers of computer worms and viruses, who know that new patches are never applied very widely or very quickly. It is possible that this new flaw could herald a series of computer failures at least as damaging as those seen earlier in the year.

Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, once made a habit of using his keynote speech at Comdex, the computer industry's top annual trade show, to launch his company's “next big thing”. Not all of these innovations succeeded, though at the time of their unveiling they all contained something to excite the industry. But times have changed. Mr Gates began his speech at the Las Vegas show this month by unveiling a dull bit of software that manages the distribution of security patches on a network. He followed this with an almost equally dreary firewall and a new spam-filtering initiative. These, rather than glitzy product announcements, are the industry's new priorities. Closing loopholes exploited by viruses, worms and hackers, said Mr Gates, is “the largest thing we are doing”.

.......