Third-party code causes half of Windows crashes, says Microsoft

According to a report on Silicon.com, Microsoft's chief security strategist, Scott Charney, made the statement at the TechEd 2003 conference in Brisbane. He said that Microsoft's reporting arm, called Dr Watson, had collected data showing that "half of all crashes in Windows are caused not by Microsoft code but third-party code".

Charney was explaining the extensive checks that are carried out upon its own coding before placing it onto the market, including close scrutiny of the work of individual developers and the systems they use, said Silicon.

Unfortunately for Charney, crashes in Windows increased as a worm known as MSBlast, LoveSan or Blaster – began infecting computers on Monday, and spread rapidly over the internet.

The worm, which had been widely anticipated and the subject of warnings from both Microsoft and the US Department of Homeland Security, targets computers vulnerable through a flaw in Microsoft's Windows operating system. A patch was developed and made available by Microsoft on the same day as the flaw was revealed, but many computer users have still not made use of it.

While not the biggest or most serious virus seen by the industry, Blaster is self-propagating, and this means that it could be around for a while. As well as crashing infected computers and systems, the worm will also use those machines to scan the internet for other vulnerable computers to infect.

In addition the worm is programmed to launch a denial of service attack where a web site is overloaded to the point of collapse at windowsupdate.com – on 16th August, and the 16th of every month thereafter.