The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft Vista has security flaws. Yes, already. In addition to a flaw that lets users increase their own privileges and override all the new fancy Vista security, there’s a “troubling” flaw in IE7. “The browser flaw is particularly troubling because it potentially means that Web users could become infected with malicious software simply by visiting a booby-trapped site.”
Fantastic. This is why testing is important! The rest of us can just wait and upgrade when it’s safe. Er, hang on, is Windows XP safe yet? Never mind.—MEGHANN MARCO
Flaws Are Detected in Microsoft’s Vista [New York Times]
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Working for a major electronics retailer in the GWN, we have been feverishly getting ready for the rollout of Microsoft Vista. The telling detail however is that all our tech guys including the national leader are all strenuoulsy advising that no-one upgrade internally within the company. Ah, Microsoft, releasing beta software to the masses since 1986.
Yep. I’m in residential ISP support, and I’m fearing the day someone calls trying to get Vista up and running. God help us.
Meh, not supprised. Has there been a single new O.S. launched, ever, that didn’t have security flaws? By any manufacturer? Even one? Nope, and there never will be. Oh My God, there is a security flaw in Windows Vista!!! I loath fear mongering..
are there bound to be flaws in Vista? Yes. Is the current one greatly exaggerated and getting undue press? Definitely
Vista “privilege escalation” flaw exaggerated
Considering no one is going to be using Vista, certainly not in any significant numbers, spammers and other unsavory types aren’t going to be that interested in security flaws for it…
I guess this is yet another similarity that Vista has to Mac OSX…in that hackers won’t be interested in developing tools to exploit the OS because it’s not widespread enough.
“The browser flaw is particularly troubling because it potentially means that Web users could become infected with malicious software simply by visiting a booby-trapped site.”
That’s hilarious… have they even heard of IE6? Or IE5? When you get right down to it, getting infected with malicious software is kind of a feature of the entire IE product line.
You guys are all nuts, this all sounds very similar to the same type of clap-trap that was spouted off when XP was being released. It went like this:
* XP is just a rip off of the Mac OS X interface (which was in beta for a significant time before XP was released and supposedly influenced the “pretty” feel of XP)
* XP is slower than windows 2000
* XP still has so many bugs, why bother upgrading.
Any one of those points may have been absolutely true but it didn’t make XP a bad operating system.
Every time I look at the accompanying pic, it looks like a Bible tract is being handed out. Maybe not too far off…
Any non-trivial piece of software is going to have security flaws. And with “data fuzzing” approaches to fault detection, it’s not very hard for a skilled hacker/security researcher to find them, either. I’m generally quite the Linux fanboy, but I admit that this is true for all operating systems and application software. The best we can generally hope for is to keep our systems patched and not be stupid. Of course, that’s asking too much of many people…
“ets users increase their own privileges and override all the new fancy Vista security”
Gee, ruin it for everybody…
I agree, Arstechnica for the win.