Red Hat Critical Advisory: Immediate Action Required For File Transfer Bug

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 . . . 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.

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