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Vista's Security Rendered Completely Useless by New Exploit

Alessandro17

By Alessandro17,
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snakeeyes
snakeeyes
Posted
Posted
Maybe you have young, geek users in mind. But your average Joe hates Aero, I can assure you. And besides an average user doesn't even consider using another theme.

 

 

yeah now that u mention it everyone I know that likes aero is young :D I never really asked an older person what they think of it, I think i will :censored2:

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snakeeyes
snakeeyes
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It doesn't need to be "an older person".

It needs to be a person with a practical (=productivity) approach to computers.

 

 

yeah sorry thats what I meant, older as in someone who uses it for getting work done rather than visiting myspace right? :censored2:

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cain.
cain.
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yeah sorry thats what I meant, older as in someone who uses it for getting work done rather than visiting myspace right? :P

 

That is, somebody who anyways should have switched to Mac :)

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vbetts
vbetts
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Vista faces some of the same problems as the other windows.

 

Some people like it, some people don't.

 

Some people hate the look of it, some people love it.

 

I know a lot of people both old and young who like Aero, but then I know people who don't like Aero. I'm personally fine with Aero, as I'm not using the windows vista aero theme by microsoft.

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Headrush69
Headrush69
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what about the security issue on this topic? personally I think as long as UAC is enabled and the user blindly doesn't allow any unknown thing to run then I doubt anyone cause damage to the system.

The problem is that the current implementation of UAC is so annoying to many people and they will disable it.

Many Windows defenders will argue it's the users fault for being stupid and disabling it, but that's a cope out. A few small changes and it wouldn't be so annoying.

 

1. When needing elevated permissions the user shouldn't need to be asked multiple times for a single task.

2. Making all windows, the background, and the taskbar fade to almost complete black to show this little yest/no dialog window is time consuming and irritating.

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snakeeyes
snakeeyes
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The problem is that the current implementation of UAC is so annoying to many people and they will disable it.

Many Windows defenders will argue it's the users fault for being stupid and disabling it, but that's a cope out. A few small changes and it wouldn't be so annoying.

 

1. When needing elevated permissions the user shouldn't need to be asked multiple times for a single task.

2. Making all windows, the background, and the taskbar fade to almost complete black to show this little yest/no dialog window is time consuming and irritating.

 

Exactly, just what I thought, vista is as secure as any other OS in my opinion and they finally got protective memory as well along with buffer overflow protection right? So windows shouldn't slow down to a point that requires a reboot. That will contribute to its stability.

 

UAC is annoying no doubt, problem is that some programs still aren't properly designed for vista's UAC and thats Microsoft fault for example Avast on one of our machines though it loads perfectly still requires administrative access to start. :)

 

Another thing they need to do is divide their control panel up for general user tasks and administrative tasks so once the password is asked they won't need to enter it again till the next time they start thee control panel.

 

What do u think? :)

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Alessandro17
Alessandro17
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Exactly, just what I thought, vista is as secure as any other OS in my opinion...............

 

What do u think? :P

 

It is too hot here to start a long discussion.

But certainly I don't believe that Vista is as secure a most *nix.

If it were, it wouldn't need an antivirus, a malware scanner...

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Alessandro17
Alessandro17
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Yeah but isn't that cause of the fact that there r still too many viruses out there that target windows? ^_^

 

No,no, no. It has been explained countless times why a virus would have a very hard time attacking a *nix OS.

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Alessandro17
Alessandro17
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other than user account control, why would it, the only other thing I can think of for linux is that it doesn't have a stable ABI layer thats constantly changing.

 

correct me if I am wrong though

 

Sorry, I am too lazy (tired actually) right now. I hope I can find one of the excellent articles that have been written about the subject or that somebody else replies ^_^

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Alessandro17
Alessandro17
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lol yeah please do reply, I really do want to know ^_^

 

You can start from here:

 

http://kerneltrap.org/node/14599

 

And here:

 

http://maketecheasier.com/linux-do-you-rea...ware/2008/04/28

 

Albeit the above articles are very far from the best ones I have read.

 

In short, Windows and the *nix were conceived in very different ways.

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(MoC)
(MoC)
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these articles talk about root priveleges as well so isn't that UAC? :)

 

UAC is infinetely easier to disable than having to crack a root password to get access to said account. And UAC is less secure than actually typing in a root password, Allow or Deny is a lot easier to manipulate than to crack an encrypted password. ;)

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Alessandro17
Alessandro17
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I've got tons of articles about vistas poor security. Just let me know what you're looking for. Here's an example ;)

 

Hi Maxintosh,

 

I am looking for an article (or maybe a post in a forum) that explains in great technical details why *nix are harder to be attacked by a virus than Windows. I am sure I read one somewhere.

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Maxintosh
Maxintosh
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Hi Alessandro17 :hysterical:

 

As the old saying goes; "To mess up a *nix box, you really need to work at it; but to mess up a Windows box, you just need to work on it" :lol:

 

See if the post below helps :)

 

Many people will tell you that there are so many Windows viruses because Windows is so popular, and that if Macs were just as popular there would be just as many Mac viruses. This is not true; virus writers write viruses that exploit any vulnerability they can find, regardless of the popularity of the platform.

 

For example, the Witty worm, aka the "Whizzer" worm, is a complex and sophisticated virus designed to infect a computer by exploiting an obscure flaw in one particular version of one particular company's software firewall program. The total number of people in the world who used this version of this program was only about 50,000--far smaller than the number of people who buy a Mac every month (Apple is, at last count I'm aware of, shipping about 100,000 Mac Minis per month)--yet the virus writers found and exploited the flaw. (Virus writers are still writing the occasional virus for AmigaDOS, fer crissakes!)

 

The architecture of MacOS makes is extremely secure for a number of reasons. One of them is that MacOS was designed on top of BSD, an already highly secure variant of Unix. By way of comparison, the Windows architecture has never been secure, and design decisions made many years ago makes it almost impossible to secure.

 

For example, both Unix and Windows systems have a feature called "RPC," which stands for Remote Procedure Call. RPC is a system that allows a computer to receive commands from another computer on a network. On the Mac, RPC is not running by default; if you wish to enable it, you must deliberately turn it on, which is not easy to do. Windows systems have RPC always running, and it cannot be turned off, because certain parts of Windows use RPC to talk to other parts of Windows even if the computer is not on a network. Because RPC is always running, a Windows computer is always listening for commands across the network; if a virus writer finds a flaw in RPC, he can use it to send commands to any Windows computer.

 

Another example: In Windows, the Web browser is built in to the operating system. Internet Explorer is always running; it runs as part of Windows. When you double-click the Explorer icon, you're not actually "launching"Explorer; its libraries are already loaded. Because of this, Explorer runs with full privileges; it is allowed to do anything, including read or write any file or make changes to the operating system, even if the user is logged in to a limited account that cannot do these things. If an attacker finds a security bug in Explorer, he can use it to do anything at all to a Windows computer--change the Registry, install software, change the operating system, whatever--because Explorer is considered part of the operating system.

 

On the Mac, the Web browser is just a program, just like any other program. If the browser tries to do something the user is not permitted to, it can't. If the browser tries to change the operating system or to install a file, the user has to type in his password; if the user doesn't type an administrator password, the browser is stopped from doing it. Security flaws in a Mac browser do not give up control of the system.

 

On a Mac, the operating system makes a clear distinction between "user space" and "system space." A computer program that the user runs is not allowed to interfere with or change the memory allocated to a part of the system. If a computer program running in user space tries to change or access memory that is allocated to the system, the system shuts that program down. On Windows, any program can access or change memory that the system is using, meaning any program can, if the programmer is clever enough, make changes to the system.

 

On the Mac, the user may not change parts of the operating system without entering an administrator password. This means any computer program the user runs can not change the system without the user typing a password. On Windows, if the user runs a program, the program can make changes to the system without a password.

 

On the Mac, programs are not permitted to access system events, like mouse clicks or buttons, that belong to other programs. On Windows, one computer program can "spoof" events in another program; that means, for example, that program A can make program B believe "the user just clicked this button," "the user just typed this," and so on. (One Windows virus dropper downloads and installs viruses this way; it makes Explorer believe "the user just asked to download this file," "the user just clicked the OK button," and so forth.)

 

It's not that there are not many Macs, and it's not that there are not many people trying to write Mac viruses. It's that the very design of MacOS makes writing viruses really, really, really difficult. There are many skilled and dedicated programmers trying quite hard to create the first OS X virus; so far, they have not succeeded, because the system architecture is very secure. link

 

The bottom line is that OS X was designed from the ground up to be secure. Windows on the other hand was not designed with security in mind and bad decisions made many a moon ago will continue to haunt them forever. At best, all they can do is just 'patch' it here and there, but that of course is not real security.

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