On May 31 2010, Financial Times reported that Google was going to phase out internal use of Microsoft Windows due to security concerns. All new employees are given the opportunity to chose between a Linux or OS X workstation. This action has spurred some rather lively discussions about what the actual reason for ditching Windows and whether it ever had anything to do with security, or for that matter, if Windows is secure or not. Ultimately, many of these blog posts, articles and rants ended up spreading misleading information about security and Windows security in particular.
With Windows being the most widely used OS. The threat against Windows is bigger than any other OS. Everybody is using it, and everybody is watching. A potential exploit can have a big success simply because enough users don't know how to protect themselves. Yet, I've read articles were people argues that Linux and OS X are better alternatives because they don't get hacked as much. This argument has utterly nothing to do with security and it's an irritating piece of information used by people to fuel the debate.
That Windows is less secure simply because it's being targeted a lot is a naive to say the least. What you should be looking at is the success rate of attacks carried out against users running Windows, which has been in steady decline ever since the release of Windows Vista. People also tend to pick on the UAC, in all fairness it is/was annoying as hell. But the truth is that it was designed that way, to pull the majority of software away from running in an elevated mode, a potential security risk.
As an attacker, if you target Windows, that's where you'll most likely find a valuable target simply because that's where normal people, like you and me do our banking and what not. What I'm trying to say is that the threat against Windows is real, the threat against Linux and OS X, not so much. I would argue that most people running Linux are more tech savvy and less likely to make the same mistakes as the average user running Windows, but you can't hold that against Microsoft or Windows because it's software designed to run software. Not software designed to protect you from danger. Windows (or any other OS for that matter) is not intelligent enough to stop you from doing something stupid (creating new vulnerabilities).
In the case of the IE6, the exploit utilized by the attack, was carried out against a decade old deprecated browser. Not Windows it self. If you allow just any software to run inside your machine, you're begging for it. What fair chance do you think a vendor like Microsoft has to protect you from a potential threat if your not serious about protection yourself? The truth is, that you, the end user, is left with a lot of power, that if you make one mistake, it can be devastating no matter the design of the OS. Many use this same example and jump to the conclusion that Windows is flawed by design. Which is absurd. There are people at Microsoft both engineers and researches that focus their entire day on preventing potential exploits from ever materializing. And they do a lot of good. But they can not stop you from pressing the red button. They can only make the warning label bigger, but typically what happens is that the user ignores the warning and clicks the button anyway. What diligent system would ever exist to prevent you from running arbitrary programs inside you computer? Isn't that the purpose of computers? to run programs? Yet, people argue that running programs are less secure by design, but that's a risk we have to take.
Security, real security has always been about establishing a network of trust. If you don't know the origin of a program, file or document, you can never presume to say it is safe. You will take a risk, every time you click something from an unknown source. And the computer has been placed in your hands to do as instructed. Think twice about clicking random things and keep your software up to date.
An interesting side note also is that computer programs, typically viruses, can't install themselves or spread between computer unless there's something to exploit. In most cases that something, is you. You opened that attachment and you downloaded that file. In the unlikely event that there was such a serious bug in a already installed program would you be at risk, but then, you trusted that program because you installed it.
Real security asks a lot of you, and you have to be willing to face these challenges if you wanna stay secure, typically the best way to protect yourself is to educate your users and make them aware of the risks. Windows is not the problem, it hasn't been a problem for many years.
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