More on the Vista security problem
from The PC InformantThere has been enough information made available by now to make a reasonable conclusion about the Vista security breach I posted about yesterday. To summarize: Vista is not as safe as it was thought to be but it’s still safer than XP. Certain security features can be gotten around but others are still in effect. Ed Bott has several posts about the subject. In his latest, he quotes Alex Sotirov, one of the original authors of the security study, who says this about PC users:
Read MoreAs long as they follow standard security practices — use antivirus products and other typical things that are good standard policy — they shouldn’t have anything to worry about. Our research is to some extent academic. The articles that describe Vista security as “broken” or “done for,” with “unfixable vulnerabilities” are completely inaccurate. One of the suggestions I saw in many of the discussions was that people should just use Windows XP. In fact, in XP a lot of those protections we’re bypassing don’t even exist. XP is even less secure than Vista in this respect. [What we established is that the security advantage of Vista over XP is not as great as [previously] thought. Vista is still very good at preventing vulnerabilities.
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