Microsoft Withdraws Vista Security Claims

Published by Omkar Joshi | Filed under Microsoft, Windows, Security, Vista, UAC, CanSecWest

Microsoft recently made a high-profile announcement, backing down on its security claims in an effort to lower consumer expectations about the security mechanisms built into Windows Vista, particularly User Account Control (UAC).

At last week’s CanSecWest security conference, Mark Russinovich, technical fellow in Microsoft’s Platform and Services Division, informed professionals that even with UAC, Vista will still be susceptible to malware. In his talk Russinovich told of how it would “end up thriving in the standard user environment, setting up botnets, and grabbing your keystrokes”.

Russinovich’s talk was supposed to give professionals an idea of how to work with UAC in order to avoid excessive pop-up warnings and avoiding breaking the UAC model. Russinovich also made clear that UAC was never intended as a “security boundary”, since there are a number of ways to bypass it.

In his talk, Russinovich also predicted that malware would find ways of elevating its privileges, through social engineering or by compromising applications that run with higher privileges.

However, this isn’t the first time Russinovich has thrown cold water on Vista’s security mechanisms, which were initially made out by Microsoft to be one of the key improvements in Windows Vista over Windows XP. In early February, soon after Vista’s consumer launch, Russinovich made the startling declaration that UAC was not really a security feature.

Windows Vista Just a False Sense of Security

Published by Omkar Joshi | Filed under Microsoft, Windows, Security, Vista, Spyware, Virus, Trojan, Antivirus, Rootkit, Windows Live OneCare

Microsoft has endowed Vista’s kernel with highly restricted access, in a bid to improve security in its new operating system. This extra security has succeeded in locking out hackers, malware purveyors and has apparently locked out security software as well.

Competing security software manufacturers say Vista’s security system alone is not enough to protect users from threats. Security firm, Webroot Software reported in January that its security testing of Vista revealed significant holes in its security shields. The tests showed Vista to have ineffective blocking capabilities and weak antivirus capabilities in the default anti-spyware and antivirus components within Vista. Webroot also found problems in Microsoft’s Live OneCare security suite.

Webroot said Windows Defender failed to block 84 percent of a testing sample set that included 15 of the most common variations of existing spyware and malware. On top of this, Windows Defender did not perform at the level of many third-party security applications.

Webroot also said that Windows Vista allowed a variety of threats to get through its security shields and remain undetected on its testing environment. These threats included adware, potentially unwanted programs (PUPs), system monitors, key loggers and Trojans. These results come after Windows Live OneCare recently came last in a recent online comparative test of antivirus applications.