Is Vista Still Vulnerable?
Symantec Discovers Issues with Beta Vista...
Vista code may have been rewritten several times to provide a stable security but Symantec has provided a plethora of issues with the Vista Beta. Is it still vulnerable?
A beta release for any software is done so that the shortcomings of the software could be detected by various users around the globe instead of having a team of testers. Beta testers are much more popular than the paid testers and the feedback usually comes from multiple sources and adds to the value of the product.
Vista released their beta couple months ago knowing that a vast population would be testing it day and night. The testers could range from laymen to people hired by other companies to beta test Vista. Vista beta release was a gamble which Microsoft undertook.
Symantec, market's leading security solution provider have conducted a detailed test on Vista security and have written a paper on it. The paper can viewed here as a pdf format. The testing process shows that Vista has issues with protocols, network and transport layer in tcp/ip, Windows firewall and the server ports. The paper is well written with detailed analysis of the problem.
Now that Symantec has published this paper, it's time for Microsoft employees to buck up and start resolving all the issues pointed out by Symantec. This could be a tense situation for those involved in coding the security threads.
Commenting on the network layer having issues, Microsoft decided to rewrite the entire network layer from the scratch although it had a working, tested copy of the network layer code available to them. The present network layer is termed as inferior to the one available in the previous versions of Windows.
If Microsoft can't overcome this hiccup, this could strike a major blow to the whole company as there has been a major expectation with Vista as being a powerful secure OS. Engineers have been working on Vista for 5 years now and a flop is the last thing on their mind. Vista is still slated for early 2007 release and a lot of sleepless developers could put Vista into the stronghold.
