SecurityZone.org - Information Security Blog

I am sure many people have noticed that vendors often ship CDs of their products without the latest security updates. A great example of this is Microsoft Windows (XP in particular). While there are good reasons in some cases to do this, in general it’s a big benefit to have the latest off the bat. Think about all those Windows boxes that would get owned within seconds from a fresh install. Well, if they were installing from a CD with all the latest patches, that would not have happened.

What made me think of this? The other day at work we had a request for an older version of ColdFusion - ColdFusion MX 7 to be exact (they’re on 8 now). For some reason I figured we would need to do a bunch of security updates on it to get it to the latest patch level. It semi-surprised me to see that the CD we received from Adobe was actually at the most current patch level. Good work Adobe — now just fix all those vulnerabilities that keep popping up in the way you handle PDF files.