It's hard to find current marketing material that makes reference to Oracle's ill-fated "Unbreakable" campaign.

Launched in November 2001 -- when everyone was shitting bricks; remember what happened two months prior -- the Unbreakable marketing campaign turned out to be the injection of silliness the IT security industry needed. Oh how we chuckled as researchers like David Litchfield from NGS Software would disclose all sorts of hideous, easily exploited vulnerabilities in the company's flasgship products.

For a secure and impenetrable database, Oracle's code turned out to be... well... pretty insecure and penetrable.

The Unbreakable campaign, it seems, has been allowed to wither and die. It seems labelling appallingly insecure products as "unbreakable" may have been too rich a claim for even the IT industry.

But still, Oracle has triumphed in one area. The company has shown us all that if you try really, really hard, never give up and have faith in your beliefs, you too can learn absolutely nothing.

Unbreakable Linux, launched in October last year, represents a departure from its old Unbreakable strategy. This time, Oracle is making assurances about the security of code it didn't write itself.

It'll probably work out better than making assurances about its own codebase. There's been 80-something security bugs in Oracle products so far this year. Tune in to my podcast for details.

If you feel like having a genuine belly laugh, have a read of Oracle's original, February 2002 Unbreakable white paper.

Highlights include:

"Those who deride Unbreakable as a marketing gimmick should ask the question: why doesn’t every vendor commit to make their security Unbreakable?"

Heh heh...

"Unbreakable sets a standard for all vendors of information technology to follow... we will improve security for the entire industry."

Ha ha ha ha ha...

"[Oracle has had] 14 independent security evaluations. (Our nearest competitors have 0 and 1 evaluations, respectively. Why are they not investing in a secure product lifecycle and provably secure software?)"

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.... rofl...

"Today, no customer who is serious about security runs their database on anything but Oracle."

STOP IT!!!! IT HURTS!!! IT HURTS! Hahahahahahaha!!!