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Microsoft Talks Back To Google's Security Claims
Kilrah_il writes "Yesterday there was a piece about Google ditching Windows for internal use because of security concerns. Now Microsoft is fighting back, claiming its products are the most secure — more than Google's and Apple's. 'When it comes to security, even hackers admit we're doing a better job making our products more secure than anyone else. And it's not just the hackers; third-party influentials and industry leaders like Cisco tell us regularly that our focus and investment continues to surpass others.'"
When it comes to security, even hackers admit we're doing a better job making our products more secure than anyone else.
Hint: Your worst nightmares do not have open jovial dialogues with you. And if they did communicate with you or offer you a score card or report, they would want you to feel as though you are completely safe -- totally unaware and unprepared for what you may face.
You've come a long way, Microsoft, but you have much much further to go. If you measure security by percentage increase in security then the evolution from Windows 95 to Windows 7 is nigh impassable. But that in no way means you're number one in the security scores. Run your marketing campaign with setting the "facts" straight but people like me know. With what little (journalistic) evidence you presented, there's no way I can build a conclusion that backs up your statement. And there's no way around that. It would better prepare you to look into the several thousand anecdotes found daily revealing the issues with Windows and Internet Explorer.
My work here is dung.
Security is NOT about patching holes, a system must be designed from the ground up to be secure. Doze and it's predecessors were NEVER designed this way. Mind you, it's created one hell of an industry patching holes.
Well, I can tell you right now that a lot of Cisco's engineers use Macs, and server-side it's Linux. That said, I imagine Cisco management, marketing, etc. are mostly Windows-based.
Secure products?
Crap.... woke up in the wrong universe again.. I hate when that happens.
Nice zero content marketingspeak there:
"...third-party influentials and industry leaders like Cisco tell us regularly that our focus and investment continues to surpass others."
Focus and investment. Notice "results" aren't on that list.
As a side note, I'd also like to add that lately BP has had a huge focus and investment on cleaning up oil spills. More so than any other oil company. But still - nobody loves them this week. Wonder why?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Hi, I'm a hacker and Windows 7 was my idea.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
All I know is that for more than ten years I made good money removing malware from Windows boxes. In all fairness tho Windows 7 is a much better effort at a secure OS but saying that 'hackers' are making such comments is just not all that believable. Any serious geek will tell you the long sorded history of windows and all its memorable virii, malware and hacks is nothing to be proud of but I guess if you start telling people what you want them to think and keep at it one day it will stick. I think a few statistics should set the record straight.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Right. That's why there's no longer any market for third-party virus checking on the Windows platform.
And all those idiotic corporate restrictions on email attachments can go, too. That'll be a great relief, because right now I can't even attach a zipfile without Outlook complaining about it.
And those flashes of screen content that appear when I reconnect to a locked Remote Terminal session, those are just in my imagination. No information exposure there, any more. Good, cause that was really stupid. Wait, I'd better check. Nope, still there.
And those irritating and needless messages requesting permission after I've launched an Active Directory management window, those are gone too, right? Because now the system has finally caught up to the X Window System technology available back in 1993?
Oh, no. Actually, I just checked, and it hasn't.
Wow, Microsoft. I am impressed. You actually drank the kool-aid to prove that it was harmless. Except that it's not.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I did a reinstall on a Vista machine recently for a friend. 100+ windows critical updates later and it was done! Really, the install itself took a fraction of the time that all the updates took. I guess if security is measured in security updates, you win Microsoft. Now claim your paper hat that says "We Won!"
Certainly Microsoft's focus and investment surpasses everyone else's. That's because it needs to simply to tread water. The problem is that most of Microsoft's security problems aren't bugs, they're design features of their system.
There's a quote from a boss: "I don't want the industrious guy who'll keep busy doing things over and over. I want the lazy guy who'll do it once, right, so he doesn't need to keep doing it over."
Hmm, I must've missed MS beating out OpenBSD for security.
Poor chaps, they can only make a "c2" grade in the old orange-book (U.S.Department of Defense) grading by removing the networking, while a mainline Linux distro hits b1 (courtesy of the CIA).
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
I don't like MS, though the truth is that with this last Windows, they are really more secure than others SO's, if you guys pay attention in the hacker championship, that one the gives a prize for the fastest hacker that invade one system, the fast invasion happens into Mac OS X, then Linux and Windows for last.
Oh, you mean Pwn2Own? 2010? Nope, Linux not tested. 2009? Nope, not tested. 2008? Can't be, the Sony Vaio running Ubuntu was never cracked.
Anybody got results from 2007 or earlier? I can't find them.
I always figured they hacked the prize they valued most and that's why Windows was on the bottom of the list.
Wrong. They always hacked the Mac because Apple is way easier to hack then Microsoft
From the links article:
This came in via e-mail: Many pundits have made a lot of the fact that the Mac was the first to be exploited in the Pwn2Own contest. Was the choice of the Mac as the first target because the hardware/operating system combo was more desirable as a prize than the commodity Windows laptops of the other competitors? Or was it just because Macintosh exploits occur with much less frequency than Windows exploits and would therefore be more newsworthy?
So until this year, applications on Apple were way easier to exploit than Windows. This is because Apple had weak ASLR and no DEP while Windows had full ASLR and DEP. This year, Snow Leopard has DEP, so its no longer trivial to exploit. In fact, I have lots of bugs in Safari that I easily could have exploited on Leopard but will be very difficult on Snow Leopard. So it used to be that that it was much worse, but now its mostly comparable (although still slightly behind)
And this is from Pwn2Own 2010.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
When we speak about GNU/Linux functionality, nobody takes relative values into account. They only take into account the absolute final result. Example, nobody takes into account the great hardware compatibility considering 99% of all drivers were written by the community after reverse engineering the hardware and/or other OSes privative drivers. People (including microsoft) only mention that GNU/Linux doesn't support all features of X hardware, and windows does, and therefore it's better.
Same thing for apps, marketshare, etc. They only say "More people have windows, it supports more apps, whatever, period. ".
So, why should we take into account relative values when talking about windows?
I don't care if they are trying hard, or if they have more marketshare, or about any other factor. The ONLY operating system that requires antivirus, antispyware, and other crap is windows. It is also the only operating system that is consistently, publicly and massively cracked around the world all the time. There are several botnets around the net that are the source of most spam, and this botnets consist of windows machines only.
So, in absolute terms, the most secure OS is OpenBSD. The most insecure is Windows.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
No, now that you mention it - I know about 3000 kids using Windows, and one kid using OpenBSD. And, now that I think about it, at least 2500 WIndows users have nuked and reinstalled multiple times. That nerdy little BSD kid just keeps on going, and going, and going, and going. I think maybe she's getting some of the Energizer Bunny.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
So what you're saying is that for the last two years Pwn2Own has been some sort of security Special Olympics? That's actually very interesting.
Did they ever have a BSD?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
All of these work without any user intervention, by default, on all running programs. Part of the OpenBSD developers' philosophy is that all code is buggy, and the system should do everything that it can to minimise the security impact of running buggy code.
Another part is that no one uses optional security measures. Windows NT has had fine-grained ACLs on all kernel objects from the start, yet people tend to leave Windows permissions wide open because they're hard. Even now, Fedora and Ubuntu documentation often says 'disable SELinux' for various things to work. It doesn't matter how secure SELinux or UAC is, if the end user disables it.
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