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Let's cut the crap about Vista security PDF Print E-mail
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by Stan Beer   
Thursday, 15 February 2007
At first the media were crowing that there were no Vista flaws to be patched. Then it was oops there was in fact one critical bug, although it was actually part of the Windows Defender security software. The real issue is, however, is that there WAS a vulnerability in Vista and there will be more.

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I can almost hear Vista advocates screaming from the rafters: "For heaven's sake it was just one tiny Vista flaw out of 20." To them I say baloney!

How many Vista users are there in the marketplace compared to XP, Win 2000 and Win 98 users? Where are the efforts being focussed by the security companies who discover these flaws? Where are the hackers most likely to direct their exploits? Not Vista with its still tiny user base.

No doubt as Vista gets more widely used, more vulnerabilities will be discovered and more zero day exploits will surface. Remember this is an operating system that is necessarily backwardly compatible with previous versions of Windows. Also remember that one of the key selling points previous versions of Windows was their stability and improved security.

Is Vista more secure than XP? Probably, unless of course you run it in administrator mode and turn off features such as the User Account Control that many users report to find annoying.

Here is a prediction. As each monthly Tuesday patching cycle is revealed to the public, there will be an increasing number of update patches released for Vista. Assuming Vista becomes the predominant Windows operating system by say 2009, as some analysts suggest, the monthly patches will be no fewer in number than they are today and the majority will involve Vista or the Microsoft software that runs on it.

At first glance, Vista looks to be a very nice, powerful and resource hungry operating system. But let's not kid ourselves; it's no more a security silver bullet than Windows XP.
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Comments (6)Add Comment
Microsoft Titanic: its just a little ice
written by Limulus, February 15, 2007
Just to remind the readers again, here was the promise, back in May:

Monthly Patch Tuesday gone with Vista says Microsoft
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/4274/53/
And the sharks circle...
written by Limulus, February 16, 2007
A frightening footnote to this article: http://www.normantranscript.co..._040004515

---

Research done by Tokyo-based security vendor Trend Micro, makers of the popular PC-cillin antivirus products, has uncovered the existence of ongoing eBay-style black hat hacker auctions where attack programs that can be used to compromise Vista computers are being bought and sold for as much as $50,000. Reports are that, in order to steal as much money as possible, computer criminals are biding their time and building their arsenals, waiting for Vista to be installed on more computers around the world before unleashing their most powerful Vista-busting weapons.
---
Waste of time
written by Arnold, September 04, 2007
I spent a solid week getting Vista to behave with hardware, flash, networks. I miss XP.
...
written by Oasis, April 26, 2008
'I spent a solid week getting Vista to behave with hardware, flash, networks. I miss XP.'

I hear you, I spent four and a half hours trying to get one application installed on Vista.
...
written by Jammit, April 26, 2008
Microsoft Fister - Bend over and take it like a man.

Ununtu Linux? Microsoft? Who?

Bye Bye Microsoft.
...
written by Ken Patching, May 10, 2008
Vista security is useless compared to XP . My freind had Vista until it crashed and lost the user profiles. We discovered we could recover all of the administrator files in Safe mode without having to login with any credentials and we could have total access to the whole of the C: drive. Try that in XP and you can't even get into Safe mode without a username and password. Like a lot of Vista users he has gone back to XP.

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