A
Anonymous
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Hi all
For those who slate microsoft software for its vulnerabilites and prefer to use other 'more secure' offerings, then this provides a word of caution.
It is a surprising excert from one of the technical newsletters I pay to subscribe to.
The author has been in the industry since the first PCs were built and rather likes Linux.
It surprised me - especially the data from Symantec
For those who slate microsoft software for its vulnerabilites and prefer to use other 'more secure' offerings, then this provides a word of caution.
It is a surprising excert from one of the technical newsletters I pay to subscribe to.
The author has been in the industry since the first PCs were built and rather likes Linux.
It surprised me - especially the data from Symantec
Take FireFox http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ , for example, a very nice browser from Mozilla.Org http://www.mozilla.org/ . It's free, Open Source, and the result of literally years of development. It's also a cross-platform application, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux--- a huge plus in computationally diverse environments because the configuration and training/learning curve is basically the same, no matter what platform the browser's installed on. Its human language support also is extensive, with versions in everything from Afrikaans to Welsh. No question: it's impressive software.
Some also like it simply because it's not from Microsoft. I think this approach has some merit: Whenever Microsoft loses serious competition in any software category, it grows complacent, and the pace of innovation slackens. IE6, for example, came out in 2001; an eternity ago, in computing terms. Except for a boatload of security updates and patches, it's still basically the same browser it was then.
But, US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team), a partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and the public and private sectors that impartially tracks all manner of security issues in operating systems and major applications, shows that the list of IE's current vulnerabilities is shorter than those for FireFox, Mozilla, and the other alternate browsers. Likewise, it also lists fewer Windows' vulnerabilities than for the other OSes.
The last time I mentioned a similar US-CERT finding, by the way, Linux partisans leapt up to tell me that US-CERT didn't know what it was doing. Linux *couldn't* have more security flaws than Windows! Everyone *knows* that Open Source software is so much better than anything from Microsoft--- right?
Well, to the dismay the more rabid anti-Microsoft partisans, reports from other independent observers corroborated CERT's findings.
For example, between July 1 and December 31, 2004, Symantec documented 13 serious vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Internet Explorer, but found 21 vulnerabilities affecting each of the Mozilla-based browsers.