A new worm is starting to spread

Security experts are rushing to decode a worm program that exploits a 2-week-old flaw to infect computers running vulnerable versions of the popular open-source Apache Web server application.

The worm is thought to be capable of spreading only to Web servers running the FreeBSD operating system, an open-source variant of Unix, that haven’t had a patch applied for the recent flaw. Although few people have reported the worm, it is thought to be infecting vulnerable Web servers worldwide.

Just a quick note for those of you that think this points out a problem in the open source universe. Quite the opposite is true. Note that the flaw was discovered only two weeks ago and a solution was quickly provided so that only a few servers have been infected.

Do you think Microsoft would respond as quickly?