Thursday, October 12, 2006

Oracle - Unbreakable "ish"

For years Oracle has been running its "Unbreakable" ad campaign - touting how Oracle is hacker-proof - especially on Linux.

Well, it turns out that they are not quite "unbreakable" - as they just released a security patch that fixes 83 "critical" security flaws. I guess they have a good excuse - beyond just the normal "Ooops, my bad" - that seems to be going around.

After all, they have been on a $19 Billion buying spree over the last two years. They had such a hard-on to "slaughter" SAP in the CRM space and after finally buying PeopleSoft (and JD Edwards as a result) - they've been really "busy" with the whole "integration thing."

So who could notice that... ummm... by the way - your database, the main product for Oracle, the "thingie" that hundreds of thousands of businesses use to store mission-critical, personal customer information in is... well... sorta' broken.

More than a little disturbing? That would be a "yes." Because at the end of the day - "unbreakable" is just a marketing campaign - right? Wrong.

Hackers are the ones that take the "unbreakable" tag line to heart - and they aren't exactly the ones coming forward with sample code for exploits they find. Rather, they're the ones that keep silent and just steal a coupla' million rows worth of personal or confidential data. Confident that their victims are all warm and snug in their beds - 100% secure in the fact that their prized information is totally safe in an "unbreakable" repository.

Never let it be said that Larry Ellison would let the facts get in the way of a great tag line.

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