Microsoft Creates Patch Management Document and Utilities

The world is waiting anxiously for a worm to hit the Internet that takes advantage of the flaw announced in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-026. The exploit code has been published publicly for about a week and malicious programmers have been working diligently to get the bugs out. Hopefully most users and security administrators have taken notice of the heightened risk and have already applied the appropriate patch to prevent another SQL Slammer incident like we had earlier this year. To help everyone keep their patching efforts under control Microsoft has released a PDF paper on patch management along with a collection of tools and utilities that you can use to verify and manage your patch implementation. With so many patches coming out all the time this is definitely worth checking out. You can download the executable zip file here: Microsoft Guide to Security Patch Management.