The latest Security Intelligence Report from Microsoft says that vulnerabilities to the Vista operating system have gone down. Most of the threats to users now lie with third-party software. One issue, however, is that the vulnerabilities being found in Vista these days are more critical. Part of the credit for the security of Vista is due to amount of restrictive features in the operating system. On the other hand these features are blamed for user dissatisfaction with Vista (they can be bothersome - I especially find User Account Control annoying!) and subsequently hindering the increase of its popularity.
Source article:
Microsoft sees OS flaws drop, application breaches rise
By Robert Westervelt, SearchSecurity.com
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1337532,00.html
Sunday, November 9, 2008
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I wonder if hacker's have also re-oriented themselves to attacking Windows XP once more. I find it rather surprising that a large portion of new PCs are shipping with XP due to the troubles inherent in heavyweight Vista.
ReplyDeleteIn this instance, it appears that Microsoft is trying to find some way to hype the restrictive user controls as being beneficial to Vista users. It will be interesting to see, however, if they keep similar controls in place with Windows 7.
If they don't get it right on user access control, will we see a more significant shift to alternative operating systems like Linux? And in turn, will such alternative OS's like Ubuntu become more appealing targets for security attacks?