Oops! Linux Bug

businessweek | at | by Mike

Thanks to ActiveWin for the link. There is nothing like a bad news!

On the surface, it was just another turn of the endless cycle of software release, hole discovery, and patching: operating system vendor Red Hat issued an advisory Tuesday warning the world about a serious security hole in a file transfer program that comes with Linux, and urged customers to download a patch. There was just one problem: Red Hat's advisory jumped the gun on what was intended to be a simultaneous multi-vendor release, carefully coordinated by the government-funded Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), and scheduled for December 3rd. Caught off guard, other Linux vendors were rushing Wednesday to finalize their own patches for the hole-- a memory-allocation bug in the ubiquitous Washington University WU-FTPd program.