Despite all the interim releases of Windows Vista, Symantec has come out and said in a report that Windows Vista is very likely to be less secure when it ships than Windows XP is today. According to Symantec, it already has discovered many security flaws within Vista that have to do with networking. Symantec says that it's Vista's large chunk of new code that is the problem. According to the Symantec report, "Microsoft has removed a large body of tried and tested code and replaced it with freshly written code, complete with new corner cases and defects. This may provide for a more stable networking stack in the long term, but stability will suffer in the short term." Microsoft has been stating that Windows Vista would build on the security that it has been achieving with XP. In fact, this is one of the reasons why Windows Vista's development has been taking a long time. The new operating system will also contain new network stacks that natively support the IPv6 standard. Microsoft responded to Symantec's report by saying "given that Windows Vista is still in the beta stage of the development and not yet final, the claims made in this report are, at best, premature. And given the extensive work we are doing to make Windows Vista the most secure version of Windows yet, we believe the claims are also unsubstantiated." Symantec said that it provided Microsoft with the report to help. Symantec said earlier last week that there were no viruses for Apple's OS X. Source: DailyTech
Have to love it when a security compnay that has major flaws in their shipping products are trashing a product still in beta .
Is that meant to be a joke? being able to set programs to execute when other users log on has never really inspired me... im guessing the same will be true in Vista, as it was in XP, NT, ME, 2000, 98 and 95...
In all honesty i would be nice if microsoft just got a clue and made Vista secure, seriously, it would be sweet, granted it would be way better if the world shifted to linux tomorrow, but what can you do
Its not possible unless Linux comes out with GUI like Windows. Easy to fiddle around and access everything, where you dont have to learn command for small things like move or delete... There is also one more thing considerable that there are no so many hackers attracted towards the Linux operating systems at the moment due to the fact that Microsoft holds the biggest share.
i would have thought"Hackers" (Don't you mean crackers? or at least call them black hats) are more interested in linux, as its servers that have all the power and most of the high-bandwidth connections (linux '0wnz' the server market), the only "hackers" (in this case script-kiddies) interested in windows are a) using it b) looking to build bot nets for DDos Windows will never be secure, micro$oft have proven this through there track record.
I am not talking Microsoft's side but I would like to say that you cannot say that Linux will be the best forever because there might be some brilliant comes out with a crack in Linux, which will make it completely useless and unsecured. On the other side, we cannot say that Microsoft will definately come out with the unsecured windows unless we see the product in the market.
People do this to windows all the time, and occasionally the same happens with Linux, The diffrence is, linux is patched within days, Windows is patched monthly (and they sometime's miss months :shock: )
LOL, you can allways hope... but it takes them weeks to get it (re)written and tested, and its even better when they dont even bother as its not "critical" (such as the createtextrange exploit in internet explorer, that phishers where using to increase there harvesting 10 fold, but that wasnt critical so dont worry!)
To do that, they would have to scrap the entire platform and redesign it from scratch. That means no existing Windows software would run, and they'd lose a big part of their coveted vendor lock-in. Waiting for security in Windows is like waiting for truth in advertising or honesty in politics: futile. It's still in beta, but the network stack is a major part of the OS. This will not change much for the final release, that is, if we're to see Vista released this decade. So what Symantec and others are saying right now is that Windows is fundamentally broken (can anyone say "duh") and that Vista will have security problems, thus assuring Symantec's place in the market (they hope). Of course, Microsoft will now be a competitor in the very industry spawned by the insecurity of their own platform, so they have very little incentive to make their platform secure. Why should they, when they can get you to pay them to work around a design flaw in their own badly implemented product? Win/win Microsoft, lose/lose consumer.
