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First Windows Vista Security Update Released
Bard Of Vim writes "Microsoft has issued critical security patches for beta testers running the Windows Vista December CTP (Community Technology Preview) and Windows Vista Beta 1, and warned that the new operating system was vulnerable to a remote code execution flaw in the Graphics Rendering Engine. The Vista patches address the same vulnerability that led to the WMF (Windows Metafile) malware attacks earlier this month. The recent out-of-cycle security update for the WMF vulnerability (see slashdot coverage) makes no mention of Windows Vista being vulnerable, but with the release of this weekend's patches it is clear that the poorly designed 'SetAbortProc,' the function that allows printing jobs to be canceled, was ported over to Vista."
Wonder what exploits there will be when its actually out?
...they're fixing bugs before they release. M$ is doing something right and actually attempting to release a more secure Windoze than XP.
They ported some functional code to their newest project. I hope they don't get unfairly bashed for this, just because a few bits of said code were discovered to be vulnerable. Every halfway intelligent programmer reuses code - it would be far more stupid not to. This is semi-interesting as a landmark ("frist patch!") but not exactly news because of what it contains.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
that Windows Vista isn't going to be all the fresh, hot goodness that we've been promised? For their own sake, Microsoft should step away from their stale and horribly insecure old code bases. They've had enough time now to rewrite the OS a few times over but it seems they chose instead to shoehorn in their old crap. Now is as good a time as any to cut the Win 9x support cord.
What a hell is happening on Microsoft? They have a major Windows version upgrade and they don't even audit their portable old code for such things?!
Eh, they fix a bug in an early beta version and you have a problem with this because?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
/dev/random
> Unpriveleged access will be the default, and it'll be damn near impossible to breach Yes, because of the hardware-level DRM chips it will be impossible. The next few Windoze OSes will be much more secure, not only from the outside, but from the user.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
All operating system updates must of necessity borrow from their predecessors. My question is: Are the security problems in Windows so bad that Microsoft should dump it; are the problems bad enough not even microsoft can go through and patch it all?
I believe it is very likely so. It is time to dump this code and go to a new platform. Whether this is done my microsoft itself or by the many alternatives out there to the Windows operating system.
"Where have all the good people gone?" - Jack Johnson
doesn't this type of thing happen in a lot of betas?
... in the computing world that applies not only to many aspects of the evolution of technology, especially software.
"Garbage in, garbage out."
I wonder how much of Vista is actually based on new code. Is Vista going to be Windows XP in Mac OSX's clothing? And is it going to inherit the same piss-poor security it's predecessor had? I certainly hope not.
This says more about Redhat FC than Microsoft, in this case. Just about weekly there is discovered a new local root vulnerability in the Linux kernel, and having dozens of those in the last year or so does not speak well of Linux security.
I have problem that they fixed this problem only because someone discovered this ugly hack and they should do that. They didn't discovered by themselves, as some of other posters pointed out, in two major version upgrades - Windows 2000 and Windows XP. And they claimed that Vista will be secure. Can you say Vista will be secure if they don't check out and don't catch such obious old design bugs like this one?
It is not how the biggest and "greatest" software company in the world should do their homework.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
hmmn, vista uses the same core as xp, and is expected to NOT have the bugs that no one knew about... some people have all the brains
portfolio
entertaining. Google "beta" products that are used by millions have huge security bugs that let malicious persons read anyone's email and nobody says much and it is swept under the rug. Microsoft's "beta" products that are only in use by testers/developers have a security issue and everybody's shaking their head and talking about how horrible MS is. It's just amusing to me.
Don't be mean. If they can pull that off it would be a huge step forward for them in terms of security. This is exactly the same issue with Windows that most people here continually complain about.
Isn't this just a little too much? Do the people who accept these sort of stories have ANY introspection at all?
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Vista will appear in the consumer market as the successor to Win MCE, at a time when HDTV, the HTPC and on-line media services are becoming mass-market.
To me, this looks like money in the bank.
You remember right. That was the deal about 4-5 years ago or so. Gates called it a "bet the company" initiative, and they decided to rewrite from scratch.
Then, a few years later, pretty much nothing worked, so they tossed out all the 4000-era builds, took a clean copy of Windows 2003 SP1, and built on top of that.
That is Vista. It's built on Server 2003 SP1.
Well I kinda summed it up a bit too much but my point is that *users* won't care about such technologies. I, as a developer, think they might be nice (but as I'm switching over to Linux I don't care too much); users won't. I was not saying Vista is stupid or limited; I was saying users will not perceive it as worth much more than XP. Then of course if developers force them to use Vista, that's another story...
Global warming is a cube.
Son, I've been hearing people say that every time Microsoft finally crimps off another length of code into a shrinkwrapped box and calls it an OS since 1995. It was true then (cos Windows NT 3.51 was out...) and it's been true for every turd they've shipped since. And people still keep buying new PCs, which keep on arriving with the current shipping Microsoft OS for that market. They don't have to sellthe thing to anyone, they just have to 'roll it out'. Even corporates work on the same basis with a 12-24 month lag behind the consumer market.
Dude. Do you HONESTLY think that virtually *ANY* non-trivial piece of software will ever be completely defect free? Ever? Even Donald Knuth paid a good chunk of money in "bounties" on his supposed bug free software, though there hasn't been one found in a while now. And TeX is orders of magnitude less complex than a typical OS distribution, such as Windows, Mac OSX, or any version of Linux.
It's utterly brain dead to "complain" that flaws are found and fixed, regardless of how seriously security is being taken.
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and after letting a bug go through a whole product line unoticed for 10 years is ironic ...
I think you misspelled iconic.
Now, any good sysadmin knows that he shouldn't be running 2.6 yet, which renders most of the 2.6 vulnerabilities moot for gauging the security of a linux box. When 2.4 was riddled with holes, we used 2.2, and so on.
Another thing good sysadmins should do to minimize threats is to chroot all of his daemons as well as not provide them with logon shells and huge 100+ character pwgen'd passwords - effectively negating the vulnerability from a server standpoint.
Those are just two of the things Linux offers us that M$ software does not. To say that local exploits on the newest kernel should be humbling to the linux community because it's no better than Microsoft's latest "stable" OS is ignorance in just about every way.