Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 20th Dec 2006 20:56 UTC
"On November 30, Sophos issued its monthly report on the top ten threats reported to them in November of 2006. As a part of this, Sophos also studied Vista's vulnerability to these malware threats. I found the information and press discussion confusing, so I thought I would clarify what this really means for customers. In order to understand what was really going on here, I asked the team to go look at the technical facts behind the story, and that started in the lab. We began by observing first-hand how these various forms of malware affect a Vista system using a machine that was configured with the default settings and without any additional security software. What we found was that if you are using only the software in Vista (e.g., Windows Mail and no add-on security software), then you are immune to all ten of the malware threats that Sophos cited."
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Member since:
2006-02-22
OK Blocking the receiving of attachments isn’t a very sophisticated way of protecting Windows, if this was just exe, pif, com file etc it would be reasonable but no, it its also most of the file types generated by MS Office. I would say Office is a very good product, it’s not unreasonable that users would want to send Excel, Access and Word files that they have produced to friends and colleagues, but this is by default blocked, why because MS security is so poor that code can hide in a spreadsheet that can do serious damage to Windows. Same for attachments in a zip file users may want to send a few Office documents in a zip file but this is blocked, many users will turn this feature off because they need to email, doc, xls files to each other. The article suggest that this blocking feature (which I would suggest is a miserable ad hoc hack) is a marvelous improvement to MS security.
I’m pleased that MS produce a malware removal tool, but the fact that it has to exist doesn’t speak well of Widows security. I’m also pleased that MS is looking at the virus problem but am concerned that they are now going to try and put AV companies out of business. If we consider what happened to Netscape it’s also interesting to note that once Netscape had almost gone MS ignored IE until Firefox emerged onto the market, would this be the same for the AV field once Norton etc are gone?