Windoze Security = Swiss Cheese

Heard about the most recent Windoze security hole? [Thanks to Famous P. for the link!] It sounds like a doozy:

"This is one of the worst Windows vulnerabilities ever," said Marc Maiffret, an executive at eEye Digital Security Inc. of Aliso Viejo, Calif., whose researchers discovered similarly dangerous flaws in at least three earlier versions of Windows. .... Maiffret said that inside vulnerable corporations, "until they have this patch installed, it will be Swiss cheese — anybody can walk in and out of their servers."

Gee, GW's decision to require all students to use Windoze laptops is looking better all the time. Famous P. suggested I send this story to the GW computer people to show them what a stupid computer policy they've got, and I was only barely able to restrain myself from doing exactly that. And that's nothing; now our "national security" is being entrusted to M$:

The announcement [of the Windows security flaw] came one day after the Department of Homeland Security announced that it awarded a five-year, $90-million contract for Microsoft to supply all its most important desktop and server software for about 140,000 computers inside the new federal agency.

Beautiful.Tell me again why people buy Windows? ;-)

(Ok, to be fair, it's likely that if 99.9% of the world's computers used Unix or Linux or the Mac OS, security flaws and viruses and whatnot would be more common on those platforms, too, but that seems more like an additional argument for diversity in computing than anything else.)

I know. I've got to get over this stupid computer policy. I'm working on it. As Bob (as in "What About Bob") would say: "I'm baby-steppin! I'm doin' the work!"

Posted July 17, 2003 10:06 AM | law school mac geek