Microsoft Patch Speed Inconsistencies

While going over the research on Microsoft's time to patch produced by Brian Krebs at SecurityFix, I noticed a few things which didn't add up. His calculations for the number of days from internal or full disclosure until patch release appeared wrong. On double checking it seems they were. The calculations for 2005 were particularly bad with a total of 118 days going missing or being added. There are many off by one errors and in one case the disclosure date was listed after the patch release date, once the year was changed from 2003 to 2002 it made sense. For both 2003 and 2004 the number of patches were counted incorrectly! Given that the information was vetted by Stephen Toulouse of Microsoft, it is strange they they both missed this. The other possibility is that I have missed something, anyone care to double check my calculations? Brian has since seen this post and linked to it.

A spreadsheet is available with my calculations next to Krebs. In my corrected days column I have italicized and centered the days where my results and his disagree. I used Open Office's DAYS() function I just do a normal subtraction to calculate the difference in the days.

• Open Office Version
• Excel Version
• HTML Version

While the errors were sometimes quite large, the average calculations are not badly affected as the days were sometimes higher, and othertimes lower than they should be. The dates are still hugely useful, and all sorts of interesting information can be derived from them (eg1, eg2), it would be nice to have the same info for other vendors. Thus, the new summary is:

UPDATE: added link to SecurityFix's follow-up post and Dan Geer's work

Posted by Dominic White