This year, BeyondTrust’s lead cybersecurity researcher, James Maude, who drove the research and analysis behind the report, provides a detailed explanation of a vulnerability phenomenon that has a particularly prominent impact on Microsoft’s vast and ever-growing attack surface. What he coins ‘The vulnerability snowball effect’ is a consequence of the longtail of legacy code that much of the Microsoft ecosystem is built on.
While most new code is developed through secure development practices and is less likely to introduce new vulnerabilities than in earlier years, any legacy code that is used brings “baggage” (in the form of vulnerabilities) with it through the evolution of product versions.