Windows 7

When Microsoft released its latest operating system, Windows 7, it was perceived as the company’s most secure launch ever — the consumation of a nine-year “Trustworthy Computing” effort to sustain a product line that had been riddled with major security holes.

Microsoft had years to enhance Windows XP, but the Conficker worm, which started spreading last year, is now thought to have infected more than 7 million Windows machines. And for every Windows bug that gets crushed, hackers appear to find new problems in the software that runs on top of Microsoft’s operating system such as Flash Player, QuickTime and Java.

The chief technology officer with Immunity, a security company that spends a lot of time finding the new software bugs states that Windows 7 is definitely by far the most secure system Microsoft has launched.

The one of the official of Microsoft revealed the statement in a recent interview that states that they had made great progress with respect to security around the core OS technology in the Windows PC. But as they did that and the net became more prevalent, the bad guys continued to evolve their attacks.

Windows may be safer, but cyber-criminals still have lot of other places to attack, they can hit hundreds of millions of users with a single attack. So most of the worst attacks today targets PCs running Windows. This arises question whether the operating system itself is secure or not.

Attackers are getting so good at sending highly customized e-mail messages, complete with malicious attachments, that the security of Windows seems nothing.

The director of research for the SANS Institute, a security training company states that the problem with the targeted attacks is that there is so much money that they can actually trump the security and the amount of money that governments and large industrial crime groups have to spend is enough to trump any of the defenses they have.

In a report published one month back for a congressional advisory panel, one of the analysts detailed exactly how this happens. Looking at attacks that have been occured, the report found that targets are carefully chosen, and then sent very believable e-mails with falsely encoded attachments that exploit bugs in a product such as Adobe Reader, something that’s outside of Microsoft’s control. As soon as victim opens the .pdf suddenly attackers have a command over the network.

Several Microsoft customers think there will be much wider enterprise adoption of Windows 7 than there was with Vista, which was widely ignored by corporate users. One of the customer wrote that as long as third-party patching continues to be a challenge, client security will continue to be at the front of information security defense and incident response. Windows 7 won’t significantly decrease client-side attacks that lead to compromises, but Microsoft either can not bear the burden of it.

According to Microsoft, it can go a long way toward solving this type of problem by enhancing the way people connect each other on the Internet. For the past few years it has advocated an idea it calls “end-to-end” trust, saying it wants to develop better association mechanisms for people, computers and software on the Internet.

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When Microsoft released its latest operating system, Windows 7, it was perceived as the company’s most secure launch ever — the consumation of a nine-year “Trustworthy Computing” effort to sustain a product line that had been riddled with major security holes.

Microsoft had years to enhance Windows XP, but the Conficker worm, which started spreading last year, is now thought to have infected more than 7 million Windows machines. And for every Windows bug that gets crushed, hackers appear to find new problems in the software that runs on top of Microsoft’s operating system such as Flash Player, QuickTime and Java.

The chief technology officer with Immunity, a security company that spends a lot of time finding the new software bugs states that Windows 7 is definitely by far the most secure system Microsoft has launched.

The one of the official of Microsoft revealed the statement in a recent interview that states that they had made great progress with respect to security around the core OS technology in the Windows PC. But as they did that and the net became more prevalent, the bad guys continued to evolve their attacks.

Windows may be safer, but cyber-criminals still have lot of other places to attack, they can hit hundreds of millions of users with a single attack. So most of the worst attacks today targets PCs running Windows. This arises question whether the operating system itself is secure or not.

Attackers are getting so good at sending highly customized e-mail messages, complete with malicious attachments, that the security of Windows seems nothing.

The director of research for the SANS Institute, a security training company states that the problem with the targeted attacks is that there is so much money that they can actually trump the security and the amount of money that governments and large industrial crime groups have to spend is enough to trump any of the defenses they have.

In a report published one month back for a congressional advisory panel, one of the analysts detailed exactly how this happens. Looking at attacks that have been occured, the report found that targets are carefully chosen, and then sent very believable e-mails with falsely encoded attachments that exploit bugs in a product such as Adobe Reader, something that’s outside of Microsoft’s control. As soon as victim opens the .pdf suddenly attackers have a command over the network.

Several Microsoft customers think there will be much wider enterprise adoption of Windows 7 than there was with Vista, which was widely ignored by corporate users. One of the customer wrote that as long as third-party patching continues to be a challenge, client security will continue to be at the front of information security defense and incident response. Windows 7 won’t significantly decrease client-side attacks that lead to compromises, but Microsoft either can not bear the burden of it.

According to Microsoft, it can go a long way toward solving this type of problem by enhancing the way people connect each other on the Internet. For the past few years it has advocated an idea it calls “end-to-end” trust, saying it wants to develop better association mechanisms for people, computers and software on the Internet.