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The Reality of Perception
Tim Mullen, 2003-04-07

A new poll finds that seventy-seven percent of security professionals believe Microsoft products are insecure. But a closer look at the survey tells a far more interesting story.

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The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
Anonymous (6 replies)
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
Bill Hey <bill.hey@nospam.dsia.com>
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
Peter
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-08
R Mortimer
It's not just market share 2003-04-08
Anonymous
Re: AnonymousPeon 2003-04-08
Just a point
Sorry, that's crap 2003-04-08
Anonymous (1 replies)
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
AnonymousPeon (2 replies)
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
Anonymous
The Reality of Perception - heh 2003-04-07
Anonymous (1 replies)
The Reality of Perception - 2003-04-08
AnonymousPeon (1 replies)
The Reality of Perception - 2003-04-09
Anonymous (1 replies)
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
ralf
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
Bill Hey <bill.hey@nospam.dsia.com> (1 replies)
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-08
Anonymous (1 replies)
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-09
anonybori
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
Scott Sorrentino (1 replies)
Stupid unstable patches 2003-04-08
Anonymous
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
Anonymous
Microsoft softwares ARE inherently insecure.

Not because they contain a lot of security holes, because they can not protect themselves against them with anything else than a patch. This means that Microsoft can not be protected at all against a security hole. All they can do is to try to remove the hole.

Under Unix, you can easily protect your application and data against an unpatched security hole. Bind is a good example of that.

Bind contains a lot of security holes and my installation is not patched at all from months. But I'm still secured because it runs as UID in a CHROOT'ed path and all files / directory are read-only for its user. Come and crack it if you wish : the best you will have is a read-only access to my DNS database. The biggest security hole you can imagine in Bind will not help you to compromise neither my DNS database nor any other service in the system.

This is the missing part in Windows : it can not protects you against a malicious program running locally. Unix (including Linux...) can.

And about using Microsoft even when knowing that, it's easy to understand: that's what we call a monopoly!

In many situation, it's difficult to move out of Microsoft's hands and the choice is not from the same people than those who answered the survey.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/152/19195#19195
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
Penguinisto (1 replies)
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-08
Anonymous
The reality of your techs 2003-04-07
Andy Wood
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
Anonymous (2 replies)
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-08
Anonymous
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-07
Anonymous
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-08
Anonymous (1 replies)
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-09
Anonymous
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-08
Anonymous (1 replies)
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-09
Gary Fisher
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-08
Anonymous
My look on things 2003-04-08
DC0 (1 replies)
My look on things 2003-04-10
Anonymous
It's easy Tim - listen up! 2003-04-08
Anonymous
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-08
Wisconsin (1 replies)
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-10
blacklight
dont blame MS-blame these stupid poeple 2003-04-10
ab_s0248@yahoo.com
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-10
Anonymous
Patch Management 2003-04-11
mesmer
The Reality of Perception 2003-04-11
Anonymous







 

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