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."

Comments

Re:Two basic steps

[hackula]

Troll much? Windows has nothing to do with it when you set all of your passwords to "123456".

Applying security patches is a good idea?

[Gothmolly]

So basically they're saying if you had better passwords and applied patches, you'd avoid security problems?

Nice to see MS on the cutting edge of security research.

Re:Applying security patches is a good idea?

[Cro Magnon]

Which is more than you can say for too many of its customers.

Why are we still using passwords?

[betterunixthanunix]

We have better authentication methods, we are just not bothering to deploy them. How many times do passwords have to fail before we acknowledge that they do not provide the sort of security that we need?

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[Lunix Nutcase]

We were waiting on you to implement it since it's so easy of a change to make.

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[DdJ]

We have better authentication methods...

Would you kindly name three?

(Please be specific. Then, we can explain how for a given set of reality-based situations, they're not in fact actually "better".)

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[hackula]

Did I say it was easy? Yes[.]

Sorry, I could not resist.

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[Desler]

I hope you aren't referring to SecurID tokens...

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[houghi]

People always talk about passwords without looking at the other part: usernames.
Often I am not able to select my username. I have more usernames then passwords. At work I have one password, which is less secure then it could be, because I need to change it every month.
I have at least 7 different usernames.
first letter first name up to 8 characters total with the last name
first letter and full last name
3 letters first name upt to 8 for the last name
last name only
first name only
department name
company name

This is at work. That does not imply that it is all from the company I work at. Several are from external companies. And I also did not count the usernames I need to share and thus are not really mine.

And this company is not that bad. With another I had also 3 different digipass machines and for 1 application I needed 3 differnt logins and passwords.

The reason that passwords are still used is because security is seen as a problem that involves only one user on one server with one access. It does not take into consideration the fact that people have many places they need to access.

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[a90Tj2P7]

That's a bit extreme for normal users. The more complexity you force on them, the more likely they are to just write the password down. It's generally accepted to force 8 characters minimum, 3 character types (between lower-case letters, capital letters, numbers and symbols) and not allow them to use any of their last 5 passwords or change the password again on the same day. Now admin accounts, 15 characters is reasonable.

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[Anonymous Coward]

That kind of policy is the reason why people use P@ssword0000001 as their password, and then increment it by one every time they're forced to change.

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[arth1]

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.

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[arth1]

Indeed.

And not only that, but by imposing published restrictions on the password, you reduce the number of possible passwords, making brute force attacks easier.

Just by saying "at least one digit", you reduce a brute force attacker's job by at least a factor of 9.5 (given you use ASCII; even more if you allow ISO-8859-x or Unicode). You reduce the time until any random password is cracked by about an order of magnitude. Or, put another way, the cracker can use a partial rainbow table that covers almost ten times as much of the total space.

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[jedidiah]

That's only necessary if you are forced to change your password frequently.

Then you're stuck with coming up with new passwords all the time and something that you will actually remember. (assuming you don't just start writing them down)

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[Desler]

And when you start doing that the user will then just write their password on a sticky note since it'll be complex to remember. And if other sites have the same policies they will just duplicate that password around. So, you've just made things more insecure.

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[b0bby]

That's a bit extreme for normal users. The more complexity you force on them, the more likely they are to just write the password down.

I have to say, in a small office environment, I'm less worried about people writing down passwords than having easy passwords which can be brute forced remotely. But I agree that 8 random characters with upper, lower & numbers should be enough for normal stuff.

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[Opportunist]

I guess you're barking up the wrong tree. The problem isn't that people can find out your passwords. The problem is that people hand them over willingly. They actively aid trojans and bank frauds. Unwittingly, of course, but because they don't know crap about the machines they are using.

The biggest attack vector today isn't even faulty software, it is user action. Opening attachments without wondering why a .pdf file prompts a "you really want to execute this attachment from 'unknown'?" from their system, rubber stamping "yes" on every UAC request, no matter whether it was for the installation of a new device driver or opening a questionable webpage.

I guarantee you, they will without delay hand over any kind of credentials you could come up with. How about Digipass keys, the thingamajigs that you sometimes get with games these days? Here's the trojan for this: Slip a trojan into the target computer and wait 'til the user tries to log on to the game the next time. Then, quickly, transmit the Digikey information the user typed in to the controlling server (which then instantly tries to log in to the game server with those credentials) while at the same time tearing down the user's internet connection to the game server. If the bot controller is successful, it tells its trojan client to shut down any and all communication from the infected machine to avoid getting kicked by the rightful player and keep him busy with the search for the reason (preferably without internet, where he might learn that this trojan exists). If not, let the client time out (or, if the game client allows itself to be hijacked, send a wrong key to the game server to make it answer "wrong key, try again"). The usual user will try again and give you another try. You should not try that more often than, say, three times or he might get suspicious. Try again when he logs in next time.

This does, of course, not work for most games that use Digipass because I left out a key element (this ain't "hacking MMO accounts 101"), but it should illustrate nicely how easily you can foil alternative authentication methods as long as you have the holder of the auth key as your (unwitting) aide.

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[Peeteriz]

I have around a hundred places online where I have been requested to "make an account" so I have one there. For almost all of them, "123456" and "password" would be too complex passwords - I'd prefer to use a blank one. I don't care about those accounts - and I don't want to care. I don't even want to have those accounts - they're usually a stupid marketing decision by the site owners to offer personalization (that I don't care about) and fight spam (which is somewhat understandable).

Would it really be appropriate to force me to fake caring by choosing "Pas$w0001234567rd", and writing it on a post-it on my monitor and also in a text file on my desktop folder?

I have good passwords for my bank account, my e-mail account and my dropbox account. For other accounts, anything more complex than 'password' is overkill that decreases my security because I won't easily remember the important passwords.

Re:Why are we still using passwords?

[JonySuede]

You can also copy the generating function and it's initialization vector unless the generator repose on the recursive measurement of a series of QBit... The injection of the initialization vector might be complicated but it is theoretically doable with entangled QBit. Therefore, unless your bank gave you a quantum cryptpo card, the only way the security is improved is through the added obscurity.

Han Solo said it best

[swm]

It's not my fault!

biometrics are not that much better and don't to w

[Joe_Dragon]

biometrics are not that much better and don't to well for say a sheared admin or other maintenance password.

Re:Two basic steps

[yuhong]

True, but there are targeted attacks even in the Unix world, and if you don't keep it up-to-date, you could be owned by one of them

Re:Two basic steps

[hackula]

Fanboy? No, I actually run Mac and Linux at home and I program cross platform at work. The fact that Conflicker happened to be for Windows has nothing to do with this. Running old software with weak passwords is a recipe for disaster on any existing OS.

Patching existing vulnerabilities

[damn_registrars]

We had the conficker worm run wild at my work not long ago. Even systems that were well secured by passwords ended up falling victim to the worm due to unpatched vulnerabilities. Yes, bad passwords don't help, but Microsoft needs to own up to the fact that a worm such as conficker is perfectly capable of infecting well-secured (password-wise) machines if they are not patched for the vulnerabilities that Microsoft left behind.

And being as some patches and updated break compatibility with critical software, patching is not always a trivial matter. Some systems need to stay essentially frozen in time with regards to updates, while still being on the network. Of course then an infected system is added to the network and away we go again.

Re:Two basic steps

[YodasEvilTwin]

If everyone stops using Windows then there will be no Windows worms, and the next popular OS will be targeted. That's economics. It's been shown repeatedly that Windows is more secure than Mac OS, just for example. Let's not argue about Linux. In fact, let's not argue about the fact that people should stop being stupid about security. The platform is really not as relevant.

Like autorun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which wasn't even properly disabled when you tried to disable it through the UI in Windows. Who were the idiots not following security best practices when they came up with that idea? Infected flash drives and non-disabled autorun were the main vectors for Conficker around here.

Re:Two basic steps

[farrellj]

Please name a Unix based attack that is equivalent to the malware being discussed.

Re:Two basic steps

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Get rid of Windows

2) Never use it again

Because if we get rid of Windows, all the malware writers in the world will give up and stop trying to steal money from people who don't update software and use "pa55word" as their password...

Re:Conversely,

[Desler]

Because you can't use poor passwords on Linux or any other *nix system? Oh wait, you can. And when I've set my password using anything from Ubuntu to Slackware there was no educational text telling me not to use bad passwords or anything of the sort. But don't let facts get in the way...

Well, kinda. There is flawed reasoning here.

[shumacher]

The assumption here is that an attacker choosing the easiest way has no other route. It would be safer to say that the route used by the worm would have been unavailable if basic preventative steps had been taken.

It's like the old joke. "Ever wonder why whatever you're looking for is always in the last place you look?" "Well, sure, once you've found it, why keep looking?"

Microsoft seems to think the authors would have stopped looking without finding an exploit route. Instead, they found one, and stopped looking.

Better authentication?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Each and every site admin comes up a different idea for more secure authentication. Then clueless management insists on dumbing it down shredding what little remains.

For example E-trade will give you the RSA key fob. Am I supposed to get a dozen key fobs from each of my bank, brokerage, mutual fund, anf 401-K administrator? Schwab would not let me use special characters in passwords. I think they also have a ridiculous 8 char limit. In this day and age where GPUs are being used for dictionary attacks? 8 char? Fidelity wanted an all numeric password because they wanted the phone based log-in used by their older customers to work in web too. On top of all that they have the password reset procedure which asks for stuff that you can find on the facebook profile.

Then there are idiotic Paychex which will lock you out after two failed login attempts. There is this site securetransfer.com that requires some 16 char password with at least two capitals two numerals and two special characters to get 100% strong password quality rating. Then there are clueless admins who tell you "never write down the password". Hello! Is there any end to this password madness?

Why can't they give me two levels of access? Read only access that lets me see account balances and verify that the check has cleared. And the write access that requires one more password that allows me to transfer funds and trade securities. May be even a third level password to send cash out of that institution to outside.

Re:Two basic steps

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Two basic steps

[g0bshiTe]

The difference is that unless it's a kernel update Linux doesn't really need a reboot on update.

Re:Two basic steps

[a90Tj2P7]

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.

Re:Two basic steps

[toadlife]

Microsoft gets to say, "hey we patched that before it was a problem". That's an unusual position for them to be in.

It's actually not an unusual position for them to be in at all. The vast majority of major Windows worms exploited vulnerabilities that had long been patched.

Updates are a big part of the problem, really ....

[King_TJ]

It's nice to keep telling people "you wouldn't have the security issue if you did all the updates right away". But to that, I'd like to tell the OS developers something else:

You wouldn't have the concerns about unpatched systems if you designed the OS so it could apply the downloaded updates without requiring system reboots!

And yes, though I'm not a software developer, I do know a little bit about this, and why it's a "tall order" (core services you can't just delete and replace with updated versions while they're in use, etc.). But I guess I'm saying this doesn't seem impossible to overcome, if someone wanted to make the functionality a priority in a new OS's design?

Unless we reach that point, people will always be delaying installation of new updates because it interferes with work they need to get done, or they're afraid an update could potentially break something they rely on and don't have time to deal with, if it goes wrong. System patches/updates need to become a less intrusive, more seamless process -- and one that can easily "roll back" any new update that turns out to cause issues. It should automatically notify the developer when this happens, and should flag the problem update so it doesn't get re-installed (but subsequent, supposedly corrected versions DO get installed ASAP).

With today's multi-core CPUs, maybe it's even possible to design systems so two instances of the OS/application environment can be run in tandem during an update process? Hand off the running processes to a parallel copy of the current environment, invisibly to the user, when an update is about to take place. Then patch the first environment, which now has no "core services" in use by apps anymore, and shuttle the apps back over to the patched environment when it's ready?

Re:Two basic steps

[Opportunist]

For this to work, companies would first of all have to agree to run their update process through said package manager. You don't think this will ever happen, do you?

What bugs me about Windows is that there is very often no way to do an unattended update at a certain time for many "packages". Windows being the notable exception. The average Windows day for the average customer runs a bit like this:

"Ok, I'd like to play a game. Let's double cli... huh? Oh, Acrobat update. Ok.... yes, accept license... wait ... download patch, watch download bar move... installing... watching bar move ... ok, we're set. Now lemme... huh? Oh, virus killer. Ok, 'tis important, go ahead and update yourself. Yes, license agreement... waiting for download (because experience taught us that you better NOT try to do anything as system critical as starting a game while something is being patched. Could upset the copy protection trojan). Huh? Failed? Oh, because the Acrobat update didn't finish yet. Ok, it's finished now insta... restart."

"And we're back after the break. Now, for the antivirus. download ... update... huh? New version? Ok, install it. Yes, I agree with the license... installing... reboot."

"Finally! Ok, first of all, let's take a look at some porn. Open Browser... oh, new version? *sigh* Ok, download and install it. ...waiting... Ok, now... huh? What happened to my plug... oh. Of course. Incompatible. Fine, but I'm not going to visit any porn pages without a decent ad blocker, so first of all, update the plugins."

(half an hour of browsing, finding them, or not finding them and searching for a replacement later ... And another few minutes later including washing your hands...)

So. Game time! Fire up Steam... updating... Ok, restart steam... While it's doing that, let's start Teamspeak... Oh. Updating... must be patch day all over the world...

Finally a good game of $whateverfps. Huh? Patch? I don't wanna, not again! Oh, no multiplayer without, huh? Ah, anti cheat stuff. Ok, make it so...

And so on, and so forth. THIS is what actually bugs me about Windows. The piecemeal updating process. You can't just keep your machine running to have it update its stuff and actually, you know, USE it when you are sitting in front of it. It seems to be critical to steal the user's time and show him that they actually patch their half baked software.

And it's not like the software (and its patchers, launchers and oh-so-important taskbar tools) wouldn't run anyways and could technically do a daily check for updates. Dear Adobe, care to inform me why you insist that your launcher is running (and turning it off only means it gets reinserted into the Run key as soon as I dare to open an Acrobat document) and steals my ram for zero return, yet STILL require me to be present for every damn update you might want to run? Why is there no option in Steam to automatically patch and restart Steam if I'm not currently playing a game?

Rolling that all into a single package handling goodie would be a blessing. And MS actually manages to do just that with their updates, the kicker is that of all the various companies that have their fingers in my system, MS bugs me the least!

Re:biometrics are not that much better and don't t

[Pope]

Severed and sheared? Your workplace sounds way too violent.

Re:Two basic steps

[Opportunist]

It's really hard for me to say that, but getting rid of Windows isn't going to do jack. Idiots using computers will be vulnerable to malware, no matter what kind of OS they use. Unless the OS is secured away from its user, there is no safety if the user himself is the biggest security hole.

The key to the whole issue is the Dancing pigs problem. In a nutshell:

"Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time."

People don't even notice the warning message, and they don't care. Why? Because they got way too used to it. UAC pops up and wants you to say yes to something, and people will click yes without thinking what's going on. Why? Because they learned the wrong lesson. They lesson they SHOULD have learned is that this window tells them to go and think whether what they are about to do should really require administrative privileges. Should displaying some childish webpage require the rights to dig into your system's bowels?

What they learned is "if I click no, it does not work". That's pretty much it, this is the way people work and think. They don't WANT to know what this window means. For them, it could as well not exist and if anyone ever tells them how to turn it off (and yes, you can), they will without thinking twice and be grateful that they got rid of that nuisance. And, bluntly, it doesn't make a lick of a difference for them anyway!

Why the heck would this be different with, say, SE-Linux? You know SE-Linux? Allegedly one of the more secure and hardened Linux flavors in the world. Hand it to Mr. Moron now using Windows 7 and it will be "pwned" in minutes. Allow me to illustrate.

Let's assume he is using Linux, even properly configured by a good friend of his who made the horrible mistake of telling him the root password. In comes my trojan, disguised as some kind of, say, torrent speed enhancer. I'll even be blunt and forward in the reasoning just why he has to install it as root.

"The software needs elevated privileges to install and properly configure the device driver needed to establish a secure connection with the controlling server to maximize the success and streamline the process. This also allows the software to work without any user interaction necessary, you will not have to enter the password ever again for this software to function properly"

In short, let me install my rootkit and hook up a connection to my bot herder server.

What will Mr. Moron read in this sentence. He doesn't understand it, at least not all of it, but he knows a few words out of that and here's what he puzzles together from this:

"The software ... technobabble ... install and properly configure (ok, it does that by itself, I guess, but only if I type in the password. If I don't, it probably won't work properly)... more technobabble ... server (server is good, I want to connect to one. I think) to maximize the success, streamline process (yeah, I want that!). No user interaction necessary later on. Never have to type the password again (great, so just once and then it works on its own. 'k, no problem, once doesn't count, right?)

He WILL hand over his credentials. Without thinking twice. And he will have forgotten about it before the trojan makes his first report to his controlling server.

It doesn't matter what system you give him. Security is the minimum of the system's capabilities and its user's capabilities. Not the average. The minimum thereof.

Re:Two basic steps

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats a false argument. You give me equal amounts of clueless users using Linux as they are with Windows and I'll name one.

The vast vast vast majority (I'd say 90+%) of Linux PCs are (1) servers that are administered professionally or (2) locked down cell phone OS or (3) desktops that geeks use. There is no way you're going to be in the same situation as Windows is with that kind of demographics.

 

Re:Two basic steps

[Anonymous Coward]

A C library update is pretty noticeable too;

ELF, ld.so, and dynamic library versioning pretty much eliminated that. Or are you one of the few that actually manually removes an old C library version and then rebuilds every single executable that complains it can't find the old version?

Re:Two basic steps

[cpu6502]

>>>shown repeatedly that Windows is more secure than Mac OS

I've never heard that before. Where has it been shown? Where does Linux fall? More or less secure than Mac?

Re:Two basic steps

[stephanruby]

Part of the problem is also running unlicensed Windows, since those people that do -- don't get the security updates (or they may just turn off updates because they don't want to be tracked, or have some of their functionality remotely shut down). At least with Linux, there isn't much of an issue there. If someone wants to stop paying RedHat/Fedora, they can just switch to Cent OS. That's it.

And really, this wouldn't be a problem for the rest of us, except that those zombie PCs can affect the rest of us, even those of us that run legitimate copies of everything. This is just like when some parents decide to not vaccinate their children, or decide to use antibiotics for every little cold (without finishing the prescription). This is technically their decision, but then again, their decision can adversely affect the rest of us.

Re:having to change passwords all the time leads t

[tlhIngan]

I used to work for a public university; when I started there, our passwords were auto-generated random strings of 8-12 alphanumerics and symbols, and we received new passwords every fiscal quarter. Our security team would run various password cracking apps on the systems, and only once did an auto-generated password get cracked.

Two years after I started there, they changed the password policy - users had to make up their own passwords. Still minimum 8 characters, at least 1 capitalized letter, 1 lower case letter, and 1 number, still changes every quarter.

With a faculty of about 150 users, we cracked approximately half of the user-defined passwords within 5 minutes of firing up JtR. My personal favorite was cracked in less than half a second:

Dolphin1

My experience is, it's less about how often the passwords change, and more an issue of users not having a good sense of what it takes to secure their data.

Or there's a mismatch between IT's perception of security with the user's. What did the password to your accounts control? If it was just access to a PC in the lab, most users would just go "meh" as they have their own PCs. And if it had any data, it would be schoolwork, work not regarded as super-secret.

OTOH, if it actually was important to them, say, it held the meal plan credit or something, they'd pick more secure passwords (if someone breaks in, I could starve).

Ditto grades and transcript - for a lot of people ,they don't care if a determined hacker sees their grades - big whoop.

You'll find the same thing applies to corporate users as well - they feel the stuff they do isn't as important as the company makes it out to be, and thus end up going "why bother - what can a hacker do with my data?".

One of IT's jobs is to stress how important the data is, and why. The HR person may not care about the data (it's not THEIR data), but they should because all the employee information is in there. What IT needs to stress is that aspect - that so few people have access to that information, should it get out, suspicion would fall on them

Re:Two basic steps

[nschubach]

20 seconds, plus waiting for your email to load back up, may as well update your local source code for the project you are working on since you have to recompile and relaunch your local dev environment in debug mode, plus waiting for your local test environment to compile and fire back up so you can continue dev-ing, plus having to log back into all your services, re-open any documents that explain what X interface is supposed to do ... it's a pain in the ass, not just 20 seconds. That popup dialog telling me to postpone for (arbitrary time) or "Reboot now!" is probably the most annoying dialog I can think of right now (thanks to the subject matter at hand.)

I've never had to kill my sessions or restart anything on my Debian machine unless it was a kernel update.

Re:Two basic steps

[Opportunist]

Again. Just in case I didn't make my point clear.

The user hands over the password.

It's not a trojan reading the file where the password is stored. It's not a hacker getting in from the outside using some supersecret backdoor account. It's not any kind of hack whatsoever. How the heck do you want to keep a password secure from its rightful owner and user?

The USER is the problem. Not the system. And unless Linux has some magical ability that I didn't notice yet, namely the ability to know what the user WANTS, instead of just what he DOES, there is exactly zero chance to protect the password. No matter the system.

Re:Two basic steps

[Opportunist]

MS is in a bind here. They are very much aware of this problem, but there is very little they can actively do against it.

It's not even MS that is the problem here, it's the way some companies (notably game companies) abuse the system and don't write to spec. In Linux, you get ravaged (to avoid a less pleasant word) if your software required more privileges than it absolutely minimally needs, and you better have a GOOD reason to ask to run as root. Hell, most packages say explicitly that you should NOT run this as root.

It's exactly the other way 'round for MS Windows. With both, old legacy reason and newer, at least as bad reasons.

The legacy reasons come from the times of the Win9x systems who arguably had zero real protection. Likewise, it didn't matter just what Registry tree you cluttered with your keys. And because it's easier and works for all users to simply slap it into the HKLM tree instead of the HKCU (aside of other, more serious, problems that you have to take into account when using HKCU), software creators didn't even think twice before sprinkling the Registry liberally with their crap. Of course, this flies right in the face of anything resembling security where HKLM or even HKCR are off limits for "user" privileged accounts. So every time this legacy junk was supposed to run, UAC throws a hissy fit.

The less acceptable reason and the one that irks me way more is that the various DRM schemes and anti-cheat crap make games require administrative privileges, not only for installation (where I could at least accept that, due to installing a device driver, these privileges are required) but also to run them. Again: To run a stupid, insignificant game, you have to bring out the big admin guns. And this is simply NOT ok.

But there is very little MS can actively do against that. As long as people buy those games despite the need for admin privs, companies will continue using DRM schemes that don't give half a crap about the system's security. And as long as this is the case, MS cannot do anything about it. What should they do?

As soon as a program requests permissions that can somehow harm the system, a sensible security watchdog function should report that something is happening that could be damaging. Else, what is it good for? The security of the system is the security of the weakest link. One link broken, the security breaks down. You can't simply "not ask just this one time". If you do that, disable it altogether. But if it really asks every time something could possibly be amiss, you get what UAC is today, along with its "allow and deny" jokes.

So please tell us, what should MS do?

So like, where is "User.education.microsoft.com"?

[bmo]

Sure, sure, blame the users again, Microsoft.

How about educating them for once? You own, according to some metrics, 90 percent of the desktop market. Your operating systems in retail boxes don't even come with quickstart guides to basic security. No, you just leave your users to flounder about without any guidance at all, and if they want it, they have to pay extra for it.

At least when I was paying for boxed sets of SuSE Linux, it came with two well-written manuals, a user's manual, and an administrator's manual. I suspect that boxed sets still include these. It was in the grand old tradition of "when you get this software, we'll give you the manual too" like what you got when you bought DOS or CP/M.

But these days, I guess that user education is viewed as "intimidating" to users, because *shock* *horror* computers might be revealed as the complicated, useful, and powerful devices they actually are and heaven forfend users get any ideas beyond clicking on the pretty pictures. Microsoft does its damnedest to not give the user *anything* that might resemble common sense lessons in security.

There is a lot of energy pointed at the education of developers, but none that I can see at day-to-day users from Microsoft.

I just dealt with a user who has become so paranoid, she considers technet.microsof.com "foreign" because she's been so abused by the utter lack of guidance in the past with computers that she can no longer tell what's legitimate or not, wrt software. I was merely pointing out a sysinternals tool. This makes me a sad panda, and I don't blame her. I can't. Because I've seen it too many times to think it's just "dumb users" anymore.

Microsoft's blaming of the user is utter bollocks. It is entirely their fault now.

Yes, this makes me mad. Deal with it.

--
BMO

Re:Two basic steps

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you think the term "Root"kit came from?

Before NT Unix was the laughing stock off security seriously. Like Windows it is also written in C and uses the same apis for buffer overflows, stack over runs, and other crack attacks.

My old World Almanac from 1990 had an editorial on the first ever Worm which nearly took down the internet. Hint ... it was all Unix based.

Get rid of IE 6 & XP!

[Billly Gates]

Save this article and email it to the idiot bean counters at work who say IE 6 is perfectly fine and so is XP so why upgrade until 2014?

I thought Conflicker came out in like 2004? It should not be infected machines today and this is stupid.

The problem is not IE and Windows. Windows 7 and IE 9 have been secure for awhile with ASLR, DEP, and sandboxing. The idiots are not the users (well most are not), but IT and CIOs and CEOs who refuse to look at things like computers as anything but cost centers. It is gray and not black and white like the CPA rules on GAAP are the golden rules for any business decision.

Use Windows Update and stop worrying if software will break. I have never heard of a piece of software not working with Windows Update for home users. If IT is looked up as tools and investments and people ran Windows Update, had proper staffing levels, and ran Windows 7 the problem wouldn't exist and it is purely preventable.

Re:Two basic steps

[Doctor_Jest]

Or you can just run Debian....

Re:Two basic steps

[Billly Gates]

You hit the nail there.

ASLR and the other OS protections are untouched because most corporations still use XP and a 10 year old kernel. The reason most software doesn't use these things and tap into them is because they wont run on XP. Corporations wont leave XP because software doesn't use things and tap into them. Cost savings are on top of this.

This is a great reason to upgrade to Windows 7 and keep your systems patched. This was totaly preventable and IT departments got what they deserved for their short sightedness on only cost savings.

Re:Two basic steps

[Tanktalus]

If you haven't restarted your session, you haven't fixed the vulnerability.

True. You will be fixed when you restart, though. I do the updates, and then, periodically, when it is safe to do so, restart daemons that have been updated. That is the point where I'm running with the fix, not merely updating the code. It's not instantly, but it does allow me to update the code even under load and defer the outage to a less sensitive time.

Reloading the desktop? That's more work as then I have to close down everything except the daemons. More of a headache. But still no reboot.

Your false sense of security is probably exactly why MS & Apple force a reboot.

No. MS forces a reboot for historical (hysterical?) reasons: they could not update files that are "in-use" because FAT, FAT32, and early versions of NTFS couldn't handle hardlinks the way that unix filesystems do. (NTFS probably could, but NT didn't use it.) Files that were "in-use" could only be updated during the reboot before they were first loaded. There was no way to get the updated code without the reboot.

Apple probably forces a reboot because their users used to use Windows where it was expected, and because it's far easier to document "reboot" than how to figure out which processes need restarting and how to restart them (safely).