When Microsoft released its latest operating system, Windows 7, it was perceived as the company’s most secure release – consuming a nine-year “Trusted Computing” effort to maintain a product line that had been plagued with significant security holes. .
Microsoft had years to improve Windows XP, but the Conficker worm, which began spreading last year, is now believed to have infected more than 7 million Windows machines. And for every Windows bug that gets squashed, hackers seem to find new problems in software that runs on top of Microsoft’s operating system, such as Flash Player, QuickTime, and Java.
The CTO of Immunity, a security company that spends a lot of time looking for new software bugs, says that Windows 7 is by far the most secure system Microsoft has ever released.
That of the Microsoft official revealed the statement in a recent interview stating that they have come a long way with regard to security around the core technology of the operating system on the Windows PC. But as they did so and the network became more prevalent, the baddies continued to develop their attacks.
Windows may be more secure, but cybercriminals still have many other places to attack, they can attack hundreds of millions of users with a single attack. That’s why most of today’s worst attacks target computers running Windows. This raises the question of whether the operating system itself is secure or not.
Attackers are getting so good at sending highly personalized emails, with malicious attachments, that Windows security appears to be nil.
The research director of the SANS Institute, a security training company, says that the problem with targeted attacks is that there is so much money that they can actually exceed security and the amount of money that governments and large industrial criminal groups have to spend. it is enough to beat any of the defenses they have.
In a report published a month ago for a Congressional advisory panel, one of the analysts detailed exactly how this happens. Looking at the attacks that have occurred, the report found that targets are carefully chosen and then very credible emails are sent with falsely encoded attachments that exploit bugs in a product like Adobe Reader – something that is beyond Microsoft’s control. As soon as the victim opens the .pdf file, all of a sudden the attackers have a command over the network.
Several Microsoft customers think that there will be a much wider business adoption of Windows 7 than with Vista, which was largely ignored by corporate users. One customer wrote that as long as third-party patching remains a challenge, customer security will continue to be at the forefront of information security defense and incident response. Windows 7 won’t significantly lessen client-side attacks that lead to compromises, but Microsoft can’t bear the brunt of it either.
According to Microsoft, it can be of great help in solving these types of problems by improving the way people connect with each other on the Internet. For the past several years, he has championed an idea he calls “end-to-end” trust, saying he wants to develop better partnership mechanisms for people, computers, and software on the Internet.