2007 in Security

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "Heise Security did a year end review — for the upcoming year 2007. In their crystal ball they see P2P bots, (almost) crashing stock exchanges, dropping prices for zero day exploits and private mails of gmail users published on the google search engine." Speculatory and amusing.

Comments

Vishfull thinking ..

[rs232]

"I think the big thing to happen to security in 2007 is Windows Vista"

It's a tribute to the MS marketing department that the emergence of Vista is seen as a big security event. All the security features in Vista have already been inplimented in the other Operating Systems. The signed drivers feeture has already been hacked.

User Account Control: aka as SuDO under nix.

Protected mode Internet Explorer: on nix the browser runs as standard user and can only access the users home directory.

Windows Defender, spyware and virus detection: not needed under Linux as enumerating badness is not a good idea.

Windows Service Hardening, monitor unusual activity to the file system, registry and network: An intrusion detection system running as root.

Network Access Protection, designed to protect your network from 'unhealthy' machines: Enumerating badness, not a good idea says Marcus J. Ranum.

"Other operating systems will copy the good ideas and avoid the bad ones"

What 'good ideas' has Vista that didn't exist previously in some form in other Operating Systems. Give specifics please.

"More development will be shifted from unsafe languages like C and C++ to Java, the .NET languages"

The languages aren't 'unsafe' it's the underlying memory management unit running on Intel processors that's unsafe.

"With increasing adoption of Unix-like OSes, perhaps we will see some exploits for these run wild, too"

Given the number of non-Windows servers out there why aren't we seeing the equivalent number of breeches. Where are all the Mac viruses. Where are all the cross platform viruses.

Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.

Speculation about what might happen in the future does't count as facts.

Vista (Score: 3, Time Shifted Propaganda)