Microsoft: 'Malware Will Thrive, Even with Vista's UAC'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 27th Apr 2007 18:23 UTC, submitted by dylansmrjones
Windows Despite all the anti-malware roadblocks built into Windows Vista, a senior Microsoft official is lowering the security expectations, warning that viruses, password-stealing Trojans and rootkits will continue to thrive as malware authors adapt to the new operating system. "There is no guarantee that malware can't hijack the elevation process or compromise an elevated application," Russinovich said after providing a blow-by-blow description of how UAC works in tandem with Internet Explorer (with Protected Mode) to limit the damage from malicious files. Even in a standard user world, he stressed that malware can still read all the user's data; can still hide with user-mode rootkits; and can still control which applications (anti-virus scanners) the user can access.
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RE[4]: Idiots
by kaiwai on Sat 28th Apr 2007 02:22 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Idiots"
kaiwai
Member since:
2005-07-06

Breaking backwards compatibility breaks everything that Microsoft really has. It is not in their interest to let ISVs look around at alternative platforms. It is also strongly in Microsoft's interests for ISVs to keep maintaining their current code rather than rewriting it (they might make it more portable!).


What are the alternatives? Mac OS X that routinely breaks compatibility? *NIX world where opensource revel in the ideal that they break compatibility on a regular basis for the sake of a superior design/approach to a problem.

The way you make it out, it would require massive re-writes. These 'insecure calls' have been known for inexcess of around 6+ years, if there are companies who are still using these insecure calls, I'd say the problem lies with those companies.

If it were me, and I was running Microsoft, I would find out those who would make changes and bring about compatibility, those who don't - and simply bring out software to replace those software titles which have refused to 'play ball'.

Oh, and there is a benefit to *NIX in the long run; applications would no longer be using outdated and unmaintained calls, meaning that wines project should be a damn site easier, beign there is less to implement for compatibility. When 140,000 calls are ripped from the stack, it will make implemening win32 of *NIX a damn sight easier.

All in all, Windows is doing okay. Backwards compatibility exerts a huge testing burden on Microsoft and forces them to keep certain things the same, but for the most part they can implement new stuff on the side in a way that's orthogonal to the old applications. In the next version of Windows, I bet we'll see massive changes to the rendering engine that will run alongside the current GDI without really interoperating with it.


You don't need to guess; just look at where WDDM is going to in regards to managing GPU resources, for example.

The problem isn't with GDI but the API calls themselves which Microsoft has deemed unsecure.

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