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Hackers, Meet Microsoft
Mz6 writes "The random chatter of several hundred Microsoft engineers filled the cavernous executive briefing center recently at the company's sprawling campus outside Seattle. Within minutes after their meeting was convened, however, the hall became hushed. Hackers had successfully
lured a Windows laptop onto a malicious wireless network. 'It was just silent,' said Stephen Toulouse, a program manager in Microsoft's security unit. 'You couldn't hear anybody breathe.' The demo was part of an extraordinary two days in which outsiders were invited into the heart of the Windows empire for the express purpose of exploiting flaws in Microsoft computing systems. The event, which Microsoft has not publicized, was dubbed 'Blue Hat' -- a reference to the widely known 'Black Hat' security conference, tweaked to reflect Microsoft's corporate color."
From TFA:
Funny...the Fedora install on my laptop seems fairly customizable and fairly secure all at once...
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Can people write, or the editors make sure that article summaries are just that, not cut and pasted paragraphs from the article? The posting makes it look like Mz6 wrote those paragraphs which is only true if she's Ina Fried .
The blue is actually a reference to the color of the square around your photograph on the Microsoft corporate cardkey. Only full-time employees of Microsoft have blue borders. Contractors and vendors have an orange border. Events for Microsoft employees only are typically referred to as "blue-badge only."
From http://www.microsoft.com/msft/FAQ/faqdividend.mspx :
WTF is up with calling programmers engineers now? The term 'engineer' is regulated in all 50 states, and calling yourself an engineer without being licensed is worthy of a fine. There are some exceptions, but these vary from state to state, making it best to completely drop the title 'engineer' unless you're actually licensed in the state you're advertising in.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
These things say to me that, within a few years, we're going to see some really damn secure stuff coming out of Microsoft.
I don't think so. Of course they are now taking security a bit more serious, but there are so many big conceptual mistakes, so many design flaws, they won't and can't fix, or they would break thousands of applications which you can't just recompile...
Like:
- case insensitive but case-preserving filesystem (ambiguities in filenames)
- active X and other unsafe scripting languages all over the place. Its not just the browser, its also word, excel and lots of other programs.
- rpc for just about everything.
- unsafe program interfaces. some application will happily accept any malformed events from some other components.
- writeable windows\system and other writeable directories. ACLs are nice, but you do have to set sensible defaults..
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Apple didn't create a new OS from scratch, they bought an existing one - NeXT (although many will argue Apple bought Steve Jobs and NeXT was a nice bonus).
Moreover, since NeXT was actually released for the first time way back in 1989, OS X's codebase is actually around 4 years *older* than Windows NT's.
Apple didd this when small and surivived. And MS can do it now but cant pospone much longer.
Microsoft will not create another from-scratch OS in the forseeable future. There is simply no need. Technically and architecturally NT is just as good as any of its contemporaries. 99% of problems in Windows come from legacy support (being phased out with .NET, x86-86 also providing a convenient excuse) and less than ideal default settings (hopefully on the way out with LH).
http://blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-05/BH_ EU_05-Kaminsky.pdf
Like the article, your post contains no commentary on the actual nature of the specific Windows problems demonstrated at "Blue Hat".
Using tools like void11, you can disconnect wireless clients. Windows automatically attempts to reconnect to the WAP. If you've got an identically-named WAP and you can overpower their WAP, they'll connect to yours instead. They won't be notified, and will think that they are on their own network. Which doesn't matter too much because you could alternately just sniff all their traffic (or even inject your own) without setting up a WAP of your own.
There's a lot that MS can do about it, and code written 2 decades ago has absolutely no bearing on it.
Synergy is your friend
If a hacker can gain access to a Windows machine via wireless (and they can according to this account), then they would be able to (and might have) accessed wireless networks outside the meeting room but inside the corporate firewall.
Anyone doing even halfway decent wireless networking in the corporate environment is simply using the wlan as a transport layer for a VPN. Without the VPN you can't get anywhere.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
- case insensitive but case-preserving filesystem (ambiguities in filenames)
How so? You can't create (for example) readme, README and ReAdMe all in the same directory on Windows, so you can't cause ambiguity like that.
- writeable windows\system and other writeable directories. ACLs are nice, but you do have to set sensible defaults..
Normal users don't have write access to the Windows of Program Files directories. Now, you can argue that MS hasn't exactly made it easy for people to run as normal users, but that's only partly true. NT has had ACLs from the beginning, and was released towards the tail end of the 90s - developers have had what, a decade to get used to the idea of user permissions on Windows? Even only counting from the release of XP, they've had 3 years or so. Yes, user-based security on Win 9x was non-exsitant, but come on.
It's official. Most of you are morons.