I ask because I think MICROSOFT should write its software morecarefully. Why should you have to buy additional software to protect yourself? Or is MICROSOFT and McAfee in cahoots? 
No operating system is 100% virus-proof. Anything devised by man can be subverted by man. Besides, if Windows was nearly virus-proof, that would only fuel the anti-monopolistic lawsuits against them. How dare they make their competitors obsolete!
There will still be needs for AV. People will still run as administrator 90% of the time even when they dont need to.
That’s like saying locksmiths ought to make better locks; locks that are unpickable. They probably could put huge amounts of time and money into such locks, but that would price them out of the reach of most of us. No OS will ever made so that it can’t be compromised - I’m not saying it can’t be made that way, just that it won’t be made that way. The time and development costs would be too great.
Valuables should be protected by layers of security. A reasonably secure OS plus a border firewall and strong password should do it for the large majority of ordinary users (and don’t forget to lock your front door). For high profile users like business and governments, they have IDS and a 24×7 monitoring center to watch over their valuables.
It’s worth noting that there are free antivirus programs. I use AVG. I think Microsoft even makes one.
One of the features of Vista is that even when you are logged in as an administrator it runs all apps under a normal user acount.
For instance, I’m running Office 2007 beta and with palm software loaded it hacked outlook to where it would only run under adminstrator…Every time I opened outlook I had to do a run as or it wouldnt start, and when I set it to open as admin every time it asked me…every time…if I really wanted to run it as admin.
That said, it wont be virus proof…but its a step in the right direction. Still a few bugs to get worked out.
While it is true that it is impossible to make a lock that is unpickable, that is no excuse for selling locks that can be cut through with kindergarten scissors. AV software would not exist if Microsoft stuff had been a bit more secure from the beginning.
While the UNIXes are not 100% secure, they are orders of magnitude better. There is nothing so much fun as knowing that email you get saying your computer has a virus is incorrect - since I’m on Solaris.
As for the OP - Antivirus software is indeed unnecessary so long as you believe that big hairball which is Vista is now 100% secure.
Sorry, as much as I hate to defend microsoft, but Unix and varients are NOT an order of magnitude more secure. This is a common misocnception brought about by two things
1: microsoft OS’s are much bigger targets because there are a lot more of them and because:
2: Microsoft users are much more likely to be lax in using the security that is there.
I do some consulting on the side and it always a an uphill battle to get users to adhere to even the simpleist of security standards.
Because of this every little wanna be hacker out there takes their best shot. Put linux on every desktop in america with every user logging in as root and setting their password to “password” and you will see them just as exploited.
Speaking as a Mac guy, here: I do think that Microsoft products are, in general, significantly less secure than most of their competitors. But to be fair, I’ve figured out a few ways I could write an arbitrary-code virus for a Mac, too (no, I haven’t actually implemented any of them). It is currently, for a variety of reasons, far less likely to get a virus or other nasty on a Mac than it is on a Windows machine. But it is not impossible. And if Mac had 90% of the market share, I’d want some pretty hefty antivirus software on mine.
I escaped the Morris worm because I was working at Bell Labs at the time, and Morris fixed the sendmail hole when he was there. Hacking did not start with Microsoft after all, a friend of mine hacked 360s almost 40 years ago.
From my recollection, security on UNIX is much better than it used to be, because no one sends out machines with default root passwords that don’t have aging any more. Consider how many people have the equivalent of Administrator privileges on UNIX machines as opposed to Windows machines.
I assure you our UNIX user base is no smarter than the average Windows user base - at least as measured by the number of reply all mailstorms we still see. It is just harder to shoot yourself.
UNIX machines have an inherently better architecture for security, not starting life from a standalone OS. It is also a hell of a lot more mature. The existence of script kiddies is not a plus for Windows! True, UNIX and Linux have a smaller installed base, but think of the egoboo someone would get from a UNIX virus. I’m sure someone would have done it by now.
Yeah, password cracking programs can do doubt let someone take over a user and do nasty things to that user. (Assuming that good password security is not implemented.) And nothing is 100% secure. With the Performance Review package at the old Bell Labs came a reprint of a memo from Kernighan about how anything can be cracked; a warning not to get too confident. But UNIX being an order of magnitude more secure might be an underestimate.
Vista - we’ll see.
Yeah, I remember hacking into stuff when microsoft was just that company that wrote basic interpreters.
I’d hafta disagree about the inteligence thing…Your average person who sets up a linux box for their primary machine is definately a lot more computer savy than your average grandma who got an xp box for christmas to get her grandkids picturs in email.
I’ve talked to a few regular users who have run the vista beta and RC…the biggest bitch? the security features that I mentioned above. First thing out of the box they wanna know how to bypass that so everything runs as admin. Same people who I regularly hafta spend hours cleaning up after virii…
The security is there in everything 2k or later…just nobody uses it.
As for bragging rights…There are tons of exploits for Linux already…I remember when teardrop came out for instance. But you wont hear about a linux exploit on the news, and thats what most of these vandals want…maximum effect…people panicing and wringing their hands on the news and sending out anoyng warning emails.
You just dont get that kind of effect on a linux box…someone finds the error…posts a fix, and its over.
It all depends upon which version of Vista you’re talking about. There’s going to be something like seven different versions available. My understanding is that once they get the kinks worked out (more on this in a bit) the 64-bit version of Vista should be the most secure and least susceptible to viruses. However, getting to that point is going to take some doing.
64-bit Vista is designed to lock programs out of the kernel, this will prevent things like rootkits and other nasty pieces of malware from screwing up your machine. It has also irritated the crap out of many anti-virus companies as they’re used to being able to access the kernel to protect your system. They’ll still be able to write software, but they can’t use the same methods they have been in the past. Not really a bad thing, IMHO.
The problems with Vista, however, come in with some of the things that Microsoft has chosen to do. They’ve completely rewritten the network stack from scratch, and it’s impossible to say how secure it is until it’s been out in the wild for a while and has had people attack it. The other problem with Vista is that with 64-bit computers you can do something called “virtualization.” Basically, this means that your operating system is running in a phoney computer inside the real one. The initial releases of Vista won’t be able to fully take advantage of virtualization, and this is risky. Already, with the beta releases of 64-bit Vista people have been able to hack the OS in undetectable ways, using virtualization, while Microsoft is no doubt working to correct these problems, they won’t be fixed when Vista hits the street next month, and more of them are certain to be discovered in the coming months and years. Security experts are recommending that you don’t adopt Vista until at least the release of Service Pack 1 for it.
Not related to security or viruses, but many early adopters are going to find themselves in for an unwelcome surprize if they install 64-bit versions of Vista on their existing machines. Microsoft has chosen to throw out backwards compatibility for a number of things with 64-bit Vista and a lot of hardware drivers aren’t going to work under it.
This is one issue that makes me suspicious. Presumably there will be an equivalent of Windows Update for Vista? How does it get to update the kernel if bugs are found that Microsoft wants to fix? I fully accept that Microsoft can make it bloody difficult for anything else to update the kernel, but I do not believe that it is impossible for some particularly adept and motivated hacker out there to reverse engineer how Windows Update gets its fixes installed. Microsoft isn’t divine (yet) - if they can update the kernel some mortal is going to be able to figure out how to. It only takes one of those hackers that also happens to be “generous” with spreading around his code to let the cat out of the bag.
The easiest vector of attack for Vista is to shred the activation system.
Good question. I can imagine a couple of ways that they could do it, but the exact method is unknown to me.
Think about this: Bill Gates meets with the CEOs fo the Antivirus world, and says; “OK gents, i’ll lay it on the table-we have a new operating system, which is virus-proof…so our customers DON’T need your products anymore. But as I’m an investor in you companies, I’ll throw you a bone…you will retain compatibility, and my programmers will generate a few “show” viruses, just to prove to the dolts/public, that they need to buy your shit”
Thunderous applause! :eek:
I have the 64 bit version of Vista set up in a dual boot on my laptop with 32…but since there is no 64 bit driver from my intel wireless card I never use it. Palm has yet to release a 64 bit driver for their PDA’s, even for XP64 and a lot of stuff isn’t going to work 64 bit ever.
All in all I like Vista, but I’m looking forward to the bugs being fixed. It’s kind of annoying at the moment.
Unfortunately for this argument, most of Microsoft’s competitors (Linux, MacOS/FreeBSD, OpenBSD, et cetera) are nearly virus-proof. Even if we assert that the reason Windows is so widely derided for its vulnerability is because of its command of the marketshare (with regard to desktops), the architecture of the modern *nix operating systems makes them much easier to secure; open source testing precludes obscuration of known vulnerabilities, and replacing a flawed system utility is trival for the administrator without breaking half the system. Security features developed by commerical developers (PAM, Unix file permissions, chroot) and open source security projects like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, GNU (BSD Auth, OpenSSH, sudo, NAT/ipchains) are also widely implemented my modern *nixs and are far more configurable and secure than Microsoft equivilents.
Note that Unix wasn’t always this way; early academic and later commericial Unices had very serious compromises in security. However, unlike Microsoft, the various *nix develpers and vendors learned about security, and that obscurity is no substitute for wide-based open source validation. (MacOSX tailgates on this by using FreeBSD utilities and a XNU/Mach 3.0 microkernel–called Darwin–under the shiny GUI.) I’ll note that the vast majority of servers, particularly those that form the Internet backbone and virtually all servers for high throughput commercial Websites like Amazon.com use a Unix-type operating system, generally some flavor of Linux or FreeBSD.
I have no opinion about Vista, not having used it, but I regard any claims about the security from Microsoft about their products with the proverbial salt cellar.
Stranger
No, they are not. there are virus’s out there for all of them. They are just not nearly as common because of market share.
Did you even read the previous post? Unix-type operating systems have the vast majority of the server market (where a virus wouldn’t just cause a few users to lose a few PowerPointless documents, but would cripple high throughput systems) and yet the number of successful viral attacks can be counted in the few dozens, the worst of them a decade or more in the past. Previous and current versions of the Windows operating system have had inherent insecurities owing to Microsoft’s security philosophy (the OS architecture version of “don’t ask, don’t tell,”) and sloppyness in their inferface protocols and scripting tools (ActiveX, OLE, VBA), whereas the various *nix distributions have been very progressive about disclosing problems and seeking quick and effective resolution. This has nothing to do with market share or popularity and everything to do with approach to security and system architecture.
Stranger