Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
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.
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.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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