Jan 18
Everywhere you turn now, you see systems running Microsoft Windows. From banking machines to parking gates to life saving equipment. My question is “Should we be worried”? I believe so.
The Windows operating system, yes even windows 7, has it’s roots on shaky ground. Bill Gates supposedly said in the early 90′s; “The Internet? We are not interested in it”. Even if he didn’t say it, this was the attitude of Microsoft during the birth of the world wide web.
In any case, I give you that background because most of the scariest attacks occur over a computer network, i.e. the Internet and this has been the area where Microsoft is the most vulnerable. Legacy operating systems like Unix were conceived with networking in mind so the underpinnings of network security was built into their kernel and operating systems coming from this ancestry – Linux, OSX (Mac), typically fair better when it comes to security.
Now don’t get me wrong, there have been attacks on Unix based systems but they are few and far between. Many argue that hackers target Windows unfairly since it is the most widely installed operating system in the world and that most of these systems are setup on home computers that don’t typically worry about security and patching. So if you were going to invest your hacking time, why not on a system that will give you the greatest rewards once you figure it out.
I still cannot give Microsoft a pass on this though, they have reaped billions of dollars of profit through the sale of Windows and you think that the could take a small percentage of this money and do some permanent fixing of the security of their OS?
Probably the reason we do see Windows everywhere is laziness by product manufacturers. Windows developers are a dime a dozen where Unix developers are harder to find.
I hope that we don’t wait for a catastrphe to move in the right direction, but based on our history it’s the only way we learn.
Later,
matt
