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Thread: Vista Security Tested

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  1. #1
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Vista Security Tested

    It appears to have out performed earlier Windows versions?

    Interesting that a lot of the improvement seems to rely on you re-booting.......... so much for "up time" bragging rights

    http://www.snpx.com/cgi-bin/news55.c...0850710?-11434

  2. #2
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    Interesting....but I freaking hate it kinda.

    I put vista on my laptop and its always asking "Are you sure you want to Continue?"


    If I click on device manager, I get that popup....change network settings, change the time, open a properties window, connect to a network, uninstall a program.

    Hell, if I go to a command prompt and type
    ipconfig /release

    it tells me I need to have administrator privilges to execute that command, but my account is the adminstrator account!

    Its pretty, but I don't like it...to much hassle for a power user i believe.
    =

  3. #3
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Yes, I can imagine that it all seems rather alien to people who are used to using the command line, and having an all omnipotent account.

    Microsoft have always been criticised for producing insecure operating systems. Actually they were mostly insecure out of the box and could be hardened by changing the settings and/or installing third party software. Now they have changed their approach.

    I have been running a variety of third party software since the days of Win 95 that do pretty much the same thing

    I don't think our Royal Navy will be adopting it (see "Windows for Warships" thread) as I can just imagine the scenario..................

    PWO: "Action stations! Action stations! air alert red! incoming! incoming! don antiflash"

    Vista: "Launch countermeasures? are you sure you want to continue?"

    This is a true story from my days in Electronic Warfare and Countermeasures:

    Two Strathclyde (Scotland) police officers were out with their shiny new hand held radar speed trap hoping to bag a few motorists.

    Along came a Convair Tornado GR4 all weather, all terrain, low level strike fighter going to his live firing practice.....................

    One of the police officers wondered how fast he was going so turned his radar on him..............

    My mob's ECM detected this "unmapped" radar with an unknown "signature" that was similar to those of shoulder launched surface to air missiles.........

    It jammed the radar in the "on" mode and prepared to automatically launch a Maverick air to ground missile at the offending signal............

    The pilot was warned of this and aborted the launch..........."are you sure you want to continue?"

    The real problem was that it was a Royal Dutch Airforce Tornado and did not recognise the new British radar.

    The moral of the story:

    Always keep your signature/pattern files up to date, and your OS and applications patched.

    And if you are a traffic cop and your radar suddenly locks at 350mph .............. throw it away and run like hell!

  4. #4
    Purveyor of Lather Syini666's Avatar
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    Ahahah, that is the most entertaining thing I have read here nihil in ages, and it gives me lots of ideas that were I to entertain them beyond my mind and into the real world would probably wind me up with a lot of 20mm holes in my body.

    Back on topic that has to be a very annoying feature to be asked every time if you are sure about something, reminds me of the joys of being asked by w2k3 why i was rebooting or shutting down, damn annoying when you are trying to get the server shut down to get the hell out of class in a reasonable amount of time.
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  5. #5
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Well I am sure you will think me cynical here, but I suspect that this is very much a case of Microsoft "covering their six"...........

    They have had a lot of criticism over the years over the "poor security" of their systems. If you look at the history, you will see that this was never an issue back in the days of DOS? computers were damn expensive back then, and generally only people who were knowlegeable and needed them spent the money. They were also unconnected, and there was no real "internet" as such.

    Malware tended to spread through sharing infected media between machines. So, if anyone got infected, it was their fault for putting the infected media in the machine?

    Now MS are going back along this route. "If you got infected you must have clicked yes, and you don't reboot your machine often enough to let Vista clean itself" that is your problem not ours.

    The real problem is that I would suggest at least 75% of purely Windows computer users are neither computer literate nor security aware.

    We just know that they are going to click "yes" don't we? and that they will always log on as administrator

    Whilst I would say that Vista has greatly improved security capabilities, and certainly seems more secure "out of the box", the only way you will actually improve the overall security picture is by user education or giving them a dumb terminal

    Naturally, these "improved" security features are annoying to computer professionals, but that seems to be the price you have to pay?

    As for your W2K3 experience, I would say that it was quite reasonable behaviour. The majority of servers are not in a classroom environment and are not shut down that regularly? This is a Win 2000 client box, and when I tell it I want to power down it throws a popup and asks me what I want to do. Log off, shut down, restart, standby?

    I just checked my Wife's Win ME box and even that asks if I want to:

    Shut down
    Restart
    Standby
    Hibernate

    I believe that Win 98SE does the same but I haven't got one of those powered up at the moment.


  6. #6
    Senior Member RoadClosed's Avatar
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    Back on topic that has to be a very annoying feature to be asked every time if you are sure about something,
    Welcome to linux when running in user mode.
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    The same goes for the constant "press to continue" in Vista. If it bothers you, just turn it off (It bothered me, so I did... :P)

    Just go to your usersettings and disable UAC.

    I do use the shutdown event tracker, btw... I find that it can be handy at times to be able to know why a server has rebooted.

  8. #8
    Senior Member RoadClosed's Avatar
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    Shutdown event tracker is cake. Meaning I like it.
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  9. #9
    Agony Aunty-Online Moira's Avatar
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    Yes, you don't have to endure UAC - turning it off was about the first thing I did in Vista. I also stopped it giving me balloon messages about less than ideal security settings.
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  10. #10
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hmmm,

    I hope you are reading all this Billy Boy.............. you set your "finest" to deliver an operating system (late, and underfeatured, just like Win95) that is supposed to be secure?

    What do we read.................. people are just looking for ways to turn the security features off?

    Just buy lottery tickets my friend

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