Posted on 31st January, 2007 by Heather
Microsoft Vista for home users was released this week. There remain concerns that it has security problems. E.g. the BBC headlined its Vista announcement as “Vista security claim challenged”. It reported the release as something of a damp squib for Microsoft - hinting at a leaky product with relatively few sales.
In fairness to Microsoft, this may be something of a kneejerk anti-Microsoft response. Windows operating systems have long had reputations for being leaky. However, it’s more likely that Microsoft products aren’t particularly vulnerable to intruders They are just much more widely dispersed and more likely to be on home users’ PCs that are wide-open to attack.
According to the Register, surely better informed than the BBC,
Microsoft launched its latest operating system - Windows Vista - on Monday, a move that will make finding easily exploitable vulnerabilities a lot harder, according to security researchers.
The Register points out that security was the main focus behind the development of Vista and Microsoft seem to have addressed most of the current security issues.
Other operating systems tend to be more secure the lower the number of users. Why would hackers bother developing complex intrusion strategies for operating systems like FreeBSD, that can be found on relatively few machines, unless the development turns out to be really easy? Attacks on Windows machines must bring much greater rewards in terms of numbers of compromised machines, even if it’s initially harder to find vulnerabilities and write the code.
Where Open Source software seems less vulnerable is in the fact that end-users usually have some control over what their operating systems are doing and how. If a Windows user’s anti-virus software doesnt identify an intrusion - pretty likely as lots of malware is designed to disable the AV and trick you into thinking it’s still working - it is well nigh impossible to identify it by looking at file changes.
All aspects of Windows drop files all over the hard disk, some of which are just taking up disk space (on the offchance you decide to install an obscure variant of a scanner that’s available only in Sumatra) and some of which are crucial system components. The registry can give the King James Bible a serious run for its money on size. An average user’s registry would not fit in the hard disk space of a PC from ten years ago. Entries are duplicated, imaginary users are created at will - have you ever had anyone use your PC as “guest”- do you really need an Admin user and Guest user, as well as yourself, on a single user PC.
All this guff mounts up. So when you have worm that burrows into the registry and changes a couple of obscure keys - how on earth do you tell? You have a random file, “diceymalwarefilename.exe”, in the Windows PreFetch directory, how on earth are you supposed to know that. You didn’t even know you had a PreFetch directory.
Install a reasonable number of apps - that’s why you have a PC, surely - and you have numbers of files that match the population figures for several European countries. Each one drops files wherever it sees fit. A goodly number start processes that run every time you start up, even though you may have forgotten you had even installed the thing months before.
These are all arguments for Linux, not because it’s intrinsically more secure, but because at least the end-user can identify some of the things going on on his or her own PC. The one you’ve paid for. You didn’t sign a licence agreement when you got the operating system or applications that said “I am happy for the manufacturer to do what ever they see fit on my hard disk and not to give me any information about what they are doing”
(Maybe you did, did you ever read one? Me neither.)
Otherwise Vista looks like it will be pretty good. The BBC’s vaunted Apple alternative is just a joke. Apple seems more like a toy manufacturer at the moment than a serious PC contender. They are making nice toys/fashion items, grossly overpriced.
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