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Microsoft Says Two Basic Security Steps Might Have Stopped Conficker
coondoggie writes "If businesses and consumers stuck to security basics, they could have avoided all cases of Conficker worm infection detected on 1.7 million systems by Microsoft researchers in the last half of 2011. According to the latest Microsoft Security Intelligence report, all cases of Conficker infection stemmed from just two attack methods: weak or stolen passwords and exploiting software vulnerabilities for which updates existed."
Yes, because it's completely impossible to turn that feature off. Oh wait...
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Turn-automatic-updating-on-or-off
If you don't want them "forced down your throat", maybe you should change the setting to instead notify you that they exist and then let you pick and choose which ones you want to install as well as those you want to ignore permanently? How is that any different from any of the automatic update services in Linux distributions bugging you to update and you continually ignoring them?
My European bank used a one-time pad in addition already 13 years ago. They replaced it with a code generating card a while ago, for improved security (no one can make a copy of a code that's not generated yet).
My US bank still uses plain passwords.
It also uses debit and credit cards with just a magnet strip (which European stores won't accept anymore), and offers cheques (which the rest of the world stopped using in the 80s). And forget about having a giro system or SWIFT. It's truly like the dark ages over here.
It's nothing like the Windows situation where you get a bag of critical patches forced down your throat every Patch Tuesday, and then your Windows box loves to reboot right in the middle of whatever you are doing. Sheesh.
1) Just as a point of clarification, Patch Tuesday is only once a month. And there's usually only about a dozen or so, only some of which are genuinely "critical". Obviously that varies though. 2) Windows Update has been a lot better for years, ever since Vista. There's nothing wrong with it now. You might be able to complain about the default settings, but they're right there and they're pretty straightforward. If you're logged in and it's set to restart automatically, it prompts you to restart or postpone it. And, obviously, you can shut down the automatic reboots or the automatically downloading/installation of updates. Besides, since moving Windows Update to an actual program after XP, there's also been a lot fewer updates that seem to require restarts. With XP, it seemed like you had to restart every single time you ran updates. Vista/7's a lot better with that.