Web admins are faster at fixing flaws to conventional Web servers than SSL servers, figures from Netcraft latest Web site survey suggest.

The study, released this Tuesday, found almost half of the 22 million Apache HTTP sites scrutinised are running Apache/1.3.26, whilst only around a quarter of the Apache SSL sites are running this version, which fixes a well publicised chunked encoding vulnerability.

This flaw, which opens the door to potential DoS attacks or remote exploits on vulnerable servers, together with recent remote vulnerabilities in Microsoft Commerce Server and Microsoft-IIS, leaves a great many ecommerce sites vulnerable to direct attack over the internet, Netcraft gloomily notes.

And that's before factoring in four remotely exploitable buffer overflows in OpenSSL or the effects of a recently demonstrated vulnerability in IE and KDE which potentially allows Web sites certified by Verisign to assume the identity of other sites, including widely used ecommerce sites.

More than just events of this month alone, 2002 is shaping up to be an annus horribilis for Web security. ®

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