LinuxMedNews was prophetic when it wrote about the inherent security risk closed source software such as Microsoft’s presents. The prediction that was made April, 2000 in ‘Closed Medical Software Poses Unacceptable Risk’ is still valid today and further bolstered by Wired’s article today about Microsoft’s recent Internet site outages. The Wired article states that ‘…most security experts agree that the network configuration problems that were revealed by Microsoft’s original blackout are far more serious than the company’s later fall to DoS [denial of service] attacks. Microsoft itself seems to agree with those sentiments, and has evidently asked for help in managing its DNS (domain name system) records…Greg Keefe, the owner and operator of DNS service provider HammerNode.com, noted that the company had “frantically off-loaded the management of their DNS to another company today.”
“I simply can’t respect that move coming from a Fortune 100 company that develops and sells DNS software as part of their core business,”…’