Microsoft a Weak Link In Possible Cyber War

climenole writes 'Microsoft has vast resources, literally billions of dollars in cash, or liquid assets reserves. Microsoft is an incredibly successful empire built on the premise of market dominance with low-quality goods,' says former White House advisor Richard Clarke in a recent book. Microsoft makes the list of risks because so many people have installed its software for critical systems.

Comments

Microsoft's Business

[HeX314]

One of my computer science professors once stated, quite succinctly, that Microsoft was not in business to make a quality operating system (or quality product). They are in business to make money.

On a related note, if they were in business to make a quality operating system, they would have a tough time selling "upgrades."

Re:He said what?

[decipher_saint]

*in deep trailer-guy voice*

"In 2010; Chairs WILL be Thrown"

I disagree

[2names]

I am not a Microsoft fan, but I believe the weak link has much more to do with the meat sitting in front of the computer than the software on the computer.

Re:He said what?

[siloko]

Part of managing a company is knowing your weaknesses.

Knowing your weaknesses is not the same as having them advertised to the world by a White House advisor!

Re:He said what?

[M. Baranczak]

Clarke is not on the "White House team". He retired a few years ago. Come on, people, would it hurt you to at least read the summary?

Re:It is simple Darwinism

[TheCarp]

I would submit that most non-windows systems are also poorly managed.

The difference is monoculture vs diversity. Look at windows users, and you will find lots of people using the same tools. Outlook, as soon as a company installs exchange you can be sure that the vast majority will be using outlook to connect to it. You find a vulnerability in outlook, or word, or a system service, and you can suddenly hit huge swaths of machines.

Now, Unix? You have multiple hardware architectures, distributions of even similar systems like Redhat and Debian Linux have made different choices for default daemons for various services. A hole in pine or mutt may not effect evolution users, or thunderbird users.

So in addition to a smaller audience, you get a smaller percentage of that audience.

to put it in business terms, the ROI of windows vulnerability exploits is just higher. That is, unless you are targeting a specific system, in which case, well, I know that where I work, many more windows servers exist than the entire unix environment, but, the Unix environment has a higher percentage of the mission critical (or more to the point, patient care critical) servers.

So thats not to say there isn't definite ROI on such attacks, it can even be higher. However, I don't think that such attacks realy factor into this discussion since specific attacks on specific machines for their content is the exception rather than the rule for most systems/users.

-Steve