This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 8:40 and is filed under Security, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Microsoft’s new update to the five year old aging XP, Vista, is not even officially out yet and security firm Sophos is claiming that three malware applications can easily infect Vista without any problem. The irony of this is that these destructive items are nearly three years old!
Stratio-Zip, Netsky-D and MyDoom were executed without issue by Sophos according to ZDNet. With variants of each of these malwares, this puts the total percentage of malware effective against Microsoft’s new “secure” operating system at 39%! Not good.
After Microsoft’s co-president Jim Allchin told the media that he would let his seven year-old son run Vista without any type of protection, just out of the box, Sophos got thinking.
“The comment about his seven-year-old spurred our idea–let’s see if malware runs on Vista,” said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos. “It does.”
“I’m certainly not going to run Vista without antivirus,” Theriault added. “And I wouldn’t take the risk with my business. Who knows how many more pieces of malware run on it?”
Vista isn’t a wash, though. “Vista is excellent, but it hasn’t really changed the security landscape,” said Theriault. “You still need antivirus, firewalls and patches at least.” Or you can just get a Mac and be done with it.
January 5th, 2007 at 17:52
…and with OSX you won’t have to wait 5 years for an update