[This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.]
Steven Christey of CVE recently commented on the fact that Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, Sun and HP all released multi-issue advisories on the same day (Feb 13). My first reaction was to come up with an amusing graphic depicting this perfect storm. Due to not having any graphic editing skills and too much cynicism, I now wonder if these are the same vendors that continually bitch about irresponsible disclosure and it “hurting their customers”?
These same customers are now being subjected to patches for at least five major vendors on the same day. In some IT shops, this is devastating and difficult to manage and recover from. If a single patch has problems it forces the entire upgrade schedule to come to a halt until the problem can be resolved. If these vendors cared for their customers like they pretend to when someone releases a critical issue w/o vendor coordination, then they would consider staggering the patches to help alleviate the burden it causes on their beloved customers.