Microsoft talks up Vista security in DC
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(InfoWorld) - Windows Vista will be the most secure operating system that Microsoft Corp. has released, a company executive said Tuesday at a Vista launch event in Washington, D.C. Microsoft has listened to feedback from users, who disagreed with the decision to have some security features turned off by default in Windows XP, said Bill Veghte, Microsoft's corporate vice president for North America. "I won't mince words," Veghte said to an audience of nearly 3,000 people. "Every single time we had a trade-off between application compatibility or security, we went with security." ButÂ Windows VistaÂ also includes a feature that shows users which applications have problems after switching from an earlier version of Windows and the fixes that are available for those issues, Veghte said. Microsoft will also submit its Office SharePoint Server 2007 for U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) certification for electronic records management, Veghte said. Microsoft, working with partner Applied Information Sciences Inc., expects to have SharePoint Service compliant with DOD 5015.2 standard in May. The DOD standard focuses on secure records handling, requiring encryption on Web-based applications, the ability to schedule records to expire, and the ability to restrict user access to documents. Applied has developed a Records Management Center add-on pack to SharePoint Server, part of the MicrosoftÂ Office 2007 suite released Tuesday along with Vista. That add-on will allow users to comply with the DOD standard and have "military-grade" records management, said Russ Stalters, Applied's chief technology officer. The add-on package will allow customers to collaborate using SharePoint without buying third-party records-management software, as SharePoint users have had to do in the past, Stalters said. By complying with the DOD standard, the software package "sets the bar" for records management for customers in highly regulated industries, he said. In addition to the DOD compliance, Microsoft's new offerings contain several new security features, Veghte said in his speech. Microsoft has the responsibility of setting the standards for secure defaults and architecture in Vista, he said. Hackers are not standing still, and "we have to keep pace," he said. Among the new security features in Vista: -- System administrators can stop PCs from allowing USB (Universal Serial Bus) drives or other peripherals to be connected. -- Vista and Internet Explorer will warn users when a Web site attempts to install dangerous code. -- An antiphishing site, updated hourly, will warn users of e-mail messages that attempt to trick them into giving up their personal information. -- If a user manages to download malware, the Windows Defender security software is designed to block it from doing damage. -- The Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Vista will allow users to encrypt hard drives. Vista's BitLocker Drive Encryption feature is an attempt to address continuing problems with data breaches, often caused by lost laptops, Veghte said. About 660,000 laptops were lost or stolen in the U.S. in 2006, he said, leading to a lot of stories about such incidents that "ended up on the front page" of major newspapers.
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Microsoft today included a set of nonsecurity updates to prepare customers to install Windows Vista Service Pack 1 as part of its monthly "Patch Tuesday" security fixes.
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A collection of new technologies to be built into Microsoft's Vista and Longhorn operating systems will improve detection of pirated versions and force unauthorized versions of the software into a limited-functionality mode, the company said Wednesday.
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With Windows Vista set to become available nationwide at 12am this evening and already on store shelves across Asia, Microsoft is preparing a slew of events to kick off its next-generation operating system, including a celebration in New York City today with both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
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Red tape vs Redmond...the never ending story The European Commission has hit back at suggestions it has got it in for Microsoft over security features built into the heavily-delayed Windows Vista.â¦
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The growing threat of hackers and viruses has prompted Microsoft to roll out a billion- dollar upgrade of its Windows computer operating system to strengthen security.
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Within its recent response to the U.S. Department of Justice that stated it would modify Windows Vista to enable end users and OEMs to change the default desktop search it uses, Microsoft for the first time discussed Service Pack 1 for the OS, saying a beta will come this year.
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Really fighting fire with fire Microsoft is pushing improved malware defences as a reason to shift over to Vista.â¦
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Microsoft said people running a pirated version of its new Windows Vista operating system will be denied access to some features.
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Speaking at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo 2004 in Orlando, Florida, yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer outlined new security initiatives, some of which would make it into a pre-Longhorn &#39;Release 2&#39; for Windows, next year.
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The U.S. Department of Justice and state attorneys general are concerned that Microsoft is revising deadlines that it agreed to as part of its antitrust settlement. At issue are changes that Microsoft says it needs to make in the schedule for releasing documentation related to Vista, according to a court document filed Tuesday.
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(Source: Messagelabs)  What are the security risks involved in migrating to Microsoft Vista? This white paper examines the implications in terms of messaging and web security which IT managers urgently need to consider.
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Microsoft can't stop crowing about new Vista security features. But the system still has holes. Here's how to plug them.
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Stoopid human Improved technology and design alone will not be enough to keep Windows Vista and Office 2007 users safe from hackers and identity thieves, according to Bill Gates.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's Ben Fathi has a new job now that Vista has shipped, but the man who led the company's Security Technology Unit is still focused on keeping the bad guys away from your PC. Fathi is now corporate vice president of development with the Windows Core Operating System Division, and is in charge of building the guts of the OS -- things like the kernel, networking, and security. IDG News Service sat down with him recently to discuss the future of Windows security. With the first Vista bugs now being reported, Fathi says it looks like Vista is on track to meet his own stated goal of having half the flaws that plagued XP during its first year. Following is an edited transcript of the interview, conductedÂ last week at theÂ RSA ConferenceÂ in San Francisco. IDGNS: What's going to be the big security story in 2007? Fathi: What we've done in previous OS releases and Vista and what our security partners are doing has treated security as a defensive measure. It's a way of stopping people from attacking you. What we want to do now is move to a world where we actually enable and simplify collaboration between different individuals, by making sure that those connections are end-to-end, that you can provide very fine grained control over the people, the applications and the resources that you give access to. IDG: So what are you doing to make that happen? Fathi: There are a number of things we are working on. For example, isolation. We look at isolation in terms of network isolation, whether it's IPsec [Internet Protocol security] or putting in firewalls, or SSL VPN [Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Network]. What we want to do is provide a better layer of isolation at the operating system level. We're looking at putting hypervisors underneath the operating system and building attestation and building a hardware root of trust on the machine. What that means is that today, if a rootkit makes it onto your machine, it can do a hyperjacking. It can take over the OS or it can even get underneath the OS so that any software you're running, like Kernel Patch Protection, won't even know that it's being lied to by a piece of malware underneath. What we want to do is put the hypervisor there and use things like the TPM [Trusted Platform Module] chip to make sure that the entire boot path is protected and secure and we can trust it and it hasn't been tampered with. This also gives you the ability to create isolation by creating partitions on the machine. Let's say you're running a server. If you consolidate your server workloads onto a single big machine -- you have a Web workload and a file server workload and a database workload. You want to protect that database workload because you're running your line-of-business apps on it. Just because somebody broke into your Web server doesn't mean they should be getting access to your database or your file server. IDGNS: Are you surprised by the number of Vista bugs that you've had reported since the launch? Fathi: I made a statement six or nine months ago that I would like to see half as many vulnerabilities as XP in the first year. Obviously I'd like less than that. I'd be happy with zero. But I think it's reasonable to say, given the additional complexity and given the additional size of Vista, that half as many would be a great goal. Am I surprised with the number? No, I think it's been a relatively small number of vulnerabilities in the three months we've been out. And given the fact that we proactively went out to the Black Hat conference and handed out copies of this, and that a couple of million people have been using Vista in test versions for the past year or so, that tells me that there are already hackers out there that are trying to attack it. So given that there are less than a handful of vulnerabilities discovered, I think that's good progress. IDGNS: And you're on track for that half as many? Fathi: I think so. Ask me again in six months. Â
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Although the much-touted security enhancements in Windows Vista make it safer than earlier versions of Windows, it is still open to attack from malicious code, according to a study by Symantec.
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SEATTLE/SAN FRANCISCO  - Computer hackers are off  and running trying to find vulnerabilities in Microsoft Corp.'s   new Windows Vista operating system, putting to test  the software maker's claim that it is the most secure Windows  program ever.