Grimes: Vista Tough OS to Hack

[don]

Will Vista be hacked? Sure, anything super-popular gets hacked. IE 7 is the most likely target, of course, followed by Windows Mail (the Outlook Express replacement), because these applications have the highest visibility and hacker interest.

Which new services are likely to be hacked? I’d put my money on the RSS feeds, XML, and the new P2P and collaboration applications. Aside from the more than 70 new services, Vista has a lot of new file formats for hackers to explore, as well.

I will go out on a limb and say that I believe Windows Vista, and the forthcoming Longhorn server, will be tough to hack. Outside of client-side attacks and Internet Explorer, the fully-patched Windows XP Pro SP2 is already pretty hard to hack externally. Vista will never be as secure as OpenBSD, but I believe it will be secure enough to ensure that Microsoft becomes known as a vendor of choice for a secure operating system. And that’s a far cry from where it was five years ago.

If you don’t believe me, talk to the many professional hackers that Microsoft has invited to test and strengthen Vista. Hundreds of internal and external hackers gave it their best whacks. A few succeeded in finding new exploits (or in re-finding old exploits). But ask any of them what they think of Microsoft’s new OS, and all will tell you it’s a lot harder to hack than its predecessor.

For full article:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/12/08/50OPsecadvise_1.html

Don

[nebu10uz]

Then it was certainly worth the wait!!

[Kev]

The key to keeping an OS safe is more about the internal policy of Microsoft. Rather than trying to make a one time impossible to hack OS, Microsoft needs to have a team of coders constantly trying to exploit this new OS and then release patches.  This kind of preventative maintenance is one of the main reasons that OpenBSD has been so secure.  Microsoft’s policy in the past was to ignore problems until someone outside their organization discovered an exploit. Then they would eventually release a patch when the exploit was being used extensively.   If they continue with their same old policy, vista will in time fall to the same problems their other operating systems have. Sure its might be a harder OS to crack at this time, but eventually it will be exploited.