Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Escapes Kaspersky's Top 10 Vulnerabilities List
An anonymous reader writes "Security firm Kaspersky has released its latest IT Threat Evolution report. There were some interesting findings in the report, as always, but the most interesting thing that stuck out was all the way at the bottom: 'Microsoft products no longer feature among the Top 10 products with vulnerabilities. This is because the automatic updates mechanism has now been well developed in recent versions of Windows OS.'"
And in other news MicroSoft purchased security firm Kaspersky for undisclosed billions of dollars in gold...
[/humor] - just kidding!
Less surprising is that the top vulnerabilities are Oracle's Java and Adobe products. In fact, Adobe can claim 5 of the top 10. Too bad I still have Reader and Flash on my system, but Java was purged from my system about a week after I stopped doing Java development.
Looks like MS is being dethroned. Between Apple, Oracle, and Adobe it's not looking good.
Agile Artisans
This article is nothing but Softie cheerleading without any meat. You have to go to the report itself for any real facts.
Indeed, this paragraph explains *why* Java exploits are common in the wild.
In other words, if you do auto-updates of java and stuff like it, you are far less vulnerable. I don't think Windows even has a facility to do this, one must roll one's own for each package.
Keeping up to date with Oracle Java on Debian style systems:
http://www.webupd8.org/2012/09/install-oracle-java-8-in-ubuntu-via-ppa.html
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BMO
Windows 7 is the best desktop OS. Secure enough, runs fast, smooth, stable, and all software and hardware works. OSX is pretty good too, but you have to buy expensive hardware to get it, and the software selection (especially regarding games) is more limited.
But you can't do auto-updates of Java, otherwise other stuff on your machine stops working.
Java is sufficiently flaky that it's very common for particular applications to need particular versions very carefully installed and configured, so you end up with several versions on your machine - allowing auto-update is a recipe for utter chaos.
You are not supposed to do developing at all. Use your smartphone to watch TV and movies as God intended.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
This is one of those things that will be hard to judge.
First off, there are more android installs than iOS, and a lot of them are older versions which aren't getting updates etc. I see what google et.al. are doing but that market fragmentation will eventually be a security nightmare.
Secondly, MS moves something like 250 million copies of windows a year, and yes, turnover is going down, but that means there are still a billion windows PC's in the wild. The smartphone market has much higher turnover, in part because of carrier subsidies and the noticeable performance improvements still happening, and in part because cell phones are just much more likely to physically fail than a desktop, so I would be surprised if there are 300 million iOS devices in the wild at all. Officially they've sold 400 million iOS devices (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57511323-37/apple-by-the-numbers-84m-ipads-400m-ios-devices-350m-ipods-sold/) through june, but a LOT of those are replacements for older iOS devices at this point (it would be a bit like MS talking about how many copies of windows it has sold since 2007 versus how many are actually in use).
Lastly, a lot of mobile devices may have vulnerabilities than can be exploited but that don't put users at risk because users don't behave in a way that exposes them to much risk. If you aren't regularly grabbing new apps, or trying to click links in e-mails or the like, well, you're not a power user but you're not at a great deal of risk either. The only person on an island doesn't really gain much by locking their door sort of thing. And we all know hackers are after things worth money. Desktops are worth money, banking information is worth money, (and banking is becoming more popular on smartphones to be sure), pictures of naked women are worth money (and those are certainly on phones....), but it's hard to know if hackers, especially serious ones, are going to refocus on desktops, because now if you have a desktop you're probably a serious productivity person, which means you have something worth stealing.
Well to be fair for the the majority of /. readers we aren't in the cheap desktop market. For one reason or another we'll find a way to drop 2k+ on our laptops and desktops. We're devs, or gamers, or video processing nerds, or guys that measure their worth by their massive stash of pirated material and seed ratio etc. Either way we seem to all want some combination of SSD, big disk capacity, massive monitor, top of the line CPU, etc. Apple gear might not be great value but they don't target the low end of the market and we generally aren't there anyways.
Not really, no. My current gaming rig cost me about 800€, my laptop was 350€ and my smartphone was 100€ (from store, not operator, no subsidy).
Quite a few of us like bang for a buck, rather then bang at any cost.
http://slashdot.org/
They don't understand that in businesses, you don't run users as admins, which is what the Adobe Updater appears to require for autoupdates.
What they need to do is bring out a decent admin tool like WSUS for their products which enables centralized administration. Ditto Apple, Firefox, Java and a truckload of other software that would probably have a bigger market share if they just understood that where business is concerned with patching and security; Microsoft 'just gets it'. That's one of the key reasons why IE is the business browser of choice, because patching it is easy and quick, not convoluted and frustrating.
That said, it is possible to centrally manage Macs, to a degree...
"Microsoft products no longer feature among the Top 10 products with vulnerabilities"
"Kaspersky Lab is a Microsoft Gold Certified Security Solutions Partner and is currently working on several joint projects with Microsoft". link
AccountKiller