One particularly atrocious design flaw of Win32, the fundamental API to most existing versions of Windows, has been known to Microsoft since 1994 and has not yet been resolved. Exploiting it has come to be known as a Shatter attack. The flaw is so fundamental it appears to be insolvable within the current design.

For a comparison, consider a Samba vulnerability found in 2003. Once notified, the developer took accountability for the mistake and the Samba project released a patch within 48 hours. Within another 24 hours, Red Hat incorporated the downloadable patch into their Linux distribution. This is not atypical in the open source software model.

HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP)

The HTTP standard requires file types to be based on the MIME type string sent from the server. The browser must handle the file appropriately for the MIME type passed. As of version 6.0, Microsoft® Internet Explorer determines a file's type by its extension, not conforming to the standard. For a conforming browser and development library see Mozilla and netlib (Necko).