Microsoft defends the decision to deliver early version of patches to US Air Force

Recent reports which said that Microsoft has been delivering early versions of their security patch updates to the United States Air Force and other critical departments of the country has raised many eyebrows. Critics are afraid that this trend might lead to security hazards with hackers trying to exploit the possible security glitches in these unfinished updates.

The company defends their policy claiming that these processes abide by strict rules, which leaves no possibilities of such happenings. The updates have little chances of leaking onto the Internet hence provide nothing to potential hackers to make use of. In addition, the company also clarified that they do not provide documentation to participants about what affected applications are fixed by these early patches.

The possibility of leakage of these unfinished updates could have bad results. Hackers can reverse engineer these codes to find out the probable glitches in the existing applications in the market. Even worse, they can use this information to extract out important information out of critical machines connected to the Internet. The company on their part claims that the process is a part of their testing program, which has an understandable goal of thoroughly testing their upcoming security patches for reliability.

For years, the software giant has refused to admit this policy of theirs. However, after Friday’s Wall Street Journal disclosed this information, they were forced to release a clarification. A senior representative of the company spoke in a statement: “The challenge for us as a company is to make sure the updates we provide are good quality.”