If the clearly ill-informed ramblings of idiots causes multiple Microsoft developers, at least one of them very senior, to waste a week, I think I've found a IRL DDOS vector into their dev process...

If you really wanted to attack their vuln-investigation processes, you would simply let them conduct business as usual since it seems they don't know how to triage potential vulnerabilities. If you force the issue by conducting a DDoS, they will respond by developing a better triage system that de-prioritizes crank vuln reports more quickly. Not only will this defeat your DDoS attempt, but it will make them more effective at handling vuln reports going forward.

I remember an xkcd to that effect. Something like nerd sniping. Yes, I found it: http://xkcd.com/356/

Those two "reported vulnerabilities" are clearly not vulnerabilities. Whoever spent 5 days investigating these "vulnerabilities" should be embarrassed instead of blogging about it. The blogger, Raymond Chen, is somehow claimed to be "Microsoft's Chuck Norris" http://microsoftjobsblog.com/blog/raymond-chen/

Raymond explains why the vulnverability investigation took so long, in his reply in this comment: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/12/15/10247...

Add together these three statements the author made:

(1) The vulnerability report exists in the "shadowy ground between the reports that are clearly crackpot and the reports which are clear enough that you can evaluate them with confidence" (from the blog)

(2) "Oh, we recognized it immediately. But it was so obviously wrong that we began to fear that we were missing something." (from the comments)

(3) "this entire investigation took five days to complete, plus another day or two to complete the necessary paperwork." (from the blog)

This blog post paints a picture that Raymond's organization does a bad job triaging reports and prioritizing investigations. It's a waste of five days to analyze an "obviously wrong" vuln report, just on the off chance that there is something deeper. How about spending five minutes emailing the author of the vuln report, explaining why it doesn't appear to be a vulnerability, then asking if there is anything deeper?

It's also crazy to spend a day or two filling out TPS reports on a crank vulnerability alert.

If an organization takes security seriously then it should spend increasing amounts of time on increasingly plausible vulnerability reports.

Those 'five days' and 'another day or two' could easily include time spent waiting on a queue, of course. In which case, it could be only a few tens of minutes of actual time would be spent on the report.

And how much time do they spend on the more plausible ones? You sound like you know this.

They do say they couldt find the vulnerability right away, that doesn't mean or doesn't exist though. If they don't investigate even the flimsiest of claims, it could cost quite a bit in cleanup.

The title made me think of some scenario from the movie "Cube"