Poll: A Third Of PC Users Blame Microsoft For Zotob Attacks

Almost as many people point the finger at Microsoft over the week's attacks on Windows 2000 as do those who blame the hackers who wrote the bots, said a U.K.-based security vendor Thursday that polled 1,000 business PC users.

The Sophos survey's numbers have to be distressing to Microsoft, which released a patch for the vulnerability prior to the attack, but still caught substantial flak from users.

According to Sophos, 35 percent of the users polled blame Microsoft, while 45 percent hold the bot writers responsible. Another 20 percent said that it's the fault of slow-footed system administrators, who didn't patch fast enough to suit them.

"What's most surprising is that so many people blame Microsoft for having the software flaw in the first place," said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with Sophos, in a statement. "Users' anger is perhaps understandable…many respondents appear to be incredibly frustrated by the constant need to roll-out emergency patches across their organizations."

But the poll results are in line with earlier surveys done by Sophos, where a minority of users have agreed that Windows is the most secure operating system. Those polls peg the number who voted for Microsoft's OS at just 28 percent, far under the 47 percent who said Linux and Unix were the most trusted.

Like other analysts this week, Cluley said that Microsoft was damned if it did, damned if it didn't.

"Microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to vulnerabilities," continued Cluley. "When it goes public about its security holes, a virus can be written to exploit them and many businesses may not have rolled out the patch. If it kept quiet, someone could still write a virus and everyone would ask why Microsoft hadn't warned anyone of the vulnerability."