Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Says Vista Most Secure OS Ever
darryl24 writes "Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia opened up TechEd 2006 in Boston Sunday evening by proclaiming that Windows Vista was the most secure operating system in the industry. But a bold statement can only go so far, and much of this week's conference has been spent reinforcing that point. Microsoft also acknowledges that nothing is infallible when it comes to computer security. In turn, the company has employed black hat hackers for what is called a penetration, or pen, test team."
The most secure OS ever? No one will take them seriously seeing as a) Its Microsoft, b) Its a ridiculous claim, c) The OS has been delayed and delayed and delayed, had tons of stuff removed, and d) THE OS ISNT EVEN OUT YET! Microsoft loves making such bold ridiculous statements. Maybe Vista is the most secure Windows platform ever (even that'd be impressive, NT was fairly solid...) but at least wait till launch for christs sake! Vista is slowly turning into the biggest joke in the Computing Industry, if they continue at this rate they'll even beat Windows ME..! PS- are the comments detail bar along the top of your screen (even when you scroll down), and the muliple story categories new? Swear I never noticed those before...
As always, future history is yet to be written--although it tends to reflect and repeat the past.
Sigs cause cancer.
I think PhantomOS is more secure. No virus in the world can infect an OS that does not exist.
Those blackhats are just making notes of the real vulnerabilities while reporting simple superficial ones.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Vista is amazingly secure. I've been trying to crack a Windows Vista machine all morning, and I can't even find one. Nothing like those operating systems that people are actually using.
said that for every version of Windows, and it's right if you considere two premises :
1) The OS is not used by anyone when the "most secure" sentence was released.
2) The only OS existing in the Microsoft world has the one made by Microsoft (excluding OS/2).
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
If the "industry" he's referring to is "the MIcrosoft operating systems industry"...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How does hiring a dozen black hat hackers compare to having thousands of professionals seeking errors at large?
The power of the public is cooperation. Someone finds a small bit and _shares_ it with others. A dozen guys in a microsoft office (pun) have none of this power.
Not finding a hole is no proof of being airtight anyway.
vajk
You can't possibly know how secure an OS is until it's deployed in the wild, statistics are garnered, attacks are noted, etc., etc. To preemptively announce that "Vista [is] the most secure OS in the industry" before it is even released makes me think Microsoft is still high on itself.
Maybe it's just marketspeak, or maybe it's more of the same arrogance that they know better what is secure than reality does. I'll sit back and wait for a few years, thanks.
Arent the white hat hackers typically the ones employed for legitimate jobs such as this? Now I'm confused :-s
Could someone explain the difference between the two so I can make sure I didnt screw up?
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Admitting employment of black hats is admitting a crime. Or, if they did a legal work, they are not black hats. Or, the article is messed up.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
No matter how secure they make Vista or any OS there will always be those users/hackers who have too much free time their hands and want to make life miserable for the rest of us. The real problem lays with the users who incorrectly store lucrative information without securing their actual computer network.
...am I supposed to put something here?
Mod the entire article as +5 Funny and move on...
For some reason, MS saying that makes me think of that line...
(Sorry if I butchered it a bit).
today is spelling optional day.
By "secure" they must mean "annoying." I'm running Vista beta 2 right now and I'm running into all sorts of security-related issues. Like warning popups when applications run, local admins not being able to delete things, local admins not even being able to do an "ipconfig /release" in order to get a new IP address via DHCP. Seriously, Vista is going to drive people freaking nuts!!
But I would never, ever, ever utter the words Vista, OpenBSD, and security in the same sentence in a positive tone.
I seem to recall that Dave Barry had a good line that would extend well to this case:
'...Windows XP, which according to everybody is the "most reliable Windows
ever." To me, this is like saying that asparagus is "the most articulate
vegetable ever."'
Microsoft just painted a huge bullseye on Vista. If the hackers were not interested in spending time finding exploits they will now. Waving red flags and yelling watch this are things you should not do unless you know for sure the bull is in the other corral or that you are an expert at the stunt you are about to try and pull. Microsoft is in the same corral with the hackers and they are not experts on OSes based on past performance.
From my favorite FarSide cartoon: Two deer standing in the woods, one has a bullseye on his chest, the other one says, "Bummer of a birth mark Hal."
If you read TFA, you'll see the phrase 'the most secure operating system in the industry' is similar to what auto makers use. Ford or Toyota never says 'Our car is the best'. They say 'The Toyota Newsupercar is best in its class', which of course means the class is limited to all vehicles that are the same year, color, size, weight, manufacturer, and model as the Toyota Newsupercar.
The 'in the industry' is most likely limited to large companies that had 2005 quarterly gross profits of over $8 billion and have a product called Windows. The "industry" is further limited to all home products with the names Vista or WindowsME.
As you can see, Vista is indeed the most secure OS in the industry.*
If this is true (I don't have a machine infected^W with Vista to test it against) that's an instant denial-of-service attack for you. Better still, there may be a way to get a shell on the Vista server under the priviledges of the user that started the RDP session ... So much for checking all interfaces parsing through incoming data to check for overflows or bad handling.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.