computerworld.com — Microsoft today denied that it has built a backdoor into Windows 7, a concern that surfaced on Wednesday after a senior National Security Agency (NSA) official testified before Congress that the agency had worked on the operating system.
Nov 20, 2009 View in Crawl 4
parappadacrappaNov 21, 2009
lol you're not kidding
inactiveuserNov 21, 2009
For the ignorant git that dugg me down..<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux</a>
alpha88Nov 22, 2009
@gobbleplex: maybe if you're a white hat that reports the error to Microsoft (which is still not announcing to the world, just the company) or a script kiddie that wants to brag about their "1337" hacking skills. But of course the second situation would require the script kiddie to actually know more than a script kiddie... making that an impossibility.A black hat hacker would use it to create a gigantic botnet that would be discovered by security experts and THEN announced to the world, but only indirectly.
harryseldonDec 1, 2009
Microsoft fails. And Microsoft does not care about international customers (so they can as well spy on them). I have just got a proof of that by trying to test Microsoft Pivot : <a class="user" href="http://digg.com/d31BZor." rel="nofollow">http://digg.com/d31BZor.</a>
johnnysoftwareDec 5, 2009
Windows PCs at enterprises have been wrecked before by installing updates to the most popular web antivirus programs and Windows itself. It is a fact. Read the trade news regularly and you will see specific accounts of it happening.What you are describing is a specific configuration of specific products ... on a good day.In other news this year:1) FBI & Washington Post alerts public that (a) banks are getting robbed by internal malware + external attacks, (b) Consumer's IE browser infected with BHO that spoofs bank authentication process to user capturing all credentials and then using Microsoft's convenient BHO facility to make it APPEAR in IE that no money was withdrawn.2) Not one but three zero day exploits via Adobe Acrobat this year: a) <a class="user" href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2341429,00.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2341429,00.as ...</a> b) <a class="user" href="http://www.daniweb.com/news/post977868.html#" rel="nofollow">http://www.daniweb.com/news/post977868.html#</a> c) <a class="user" href="http://blog.trendmicro.com/new-adobe-zero-day-exploit/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.trendmicro.com/new-adobe-zero-day-expl ...</a>3) Conficker repeatedly infected enterprise computers in waves, at times 7 or 8 million Windows PCs.Malware is having zero problems finding enterprise computers to infect. A few years ago, the trend was laptops brought from home were infecting Windows PCs all over the network, in some cases all over a TV news network's offices! Today, the tides are reversed and the badly infected Windows PCs in the office are infecting home computers coaxing them to steal things that people access on the Internet home home.If enterprises were truly locked down against Windows malware that would not happen but in reality, offices have been like the schools are with kids colds during flu season: the hub that viruses use to spread from home to home. Could be why Mac sales have shot upward the past couple of months. People do not like getting robbed at home by doing their job at work. Interestingly, more Macs in homes might do more good at reducing successful malware attacks in offices than enterprise security changes, not to mention eliminating them from homes.So things at many, many offices are not really the way you portray them to be. Reality is very different than what you see in an ad and catalogs.
johnnysoftwareDec 5, 2009
The source code for Windows can only be examined by Microsoft, the many agencies all over the world they have shared it with, some universities they have shared it with, companies they have shared it with, and the people who say stolen copies of it when it was ripped off by cyberthieves from various enterprises.Windows 7 source code might be more restricted but I would be surprised.The "code" for Windows can be examined by anyone. You can look at it in hex, you can look at in in a debugger/disassembler. You can write programs to dump it and analyze it just as programmers have been doing on every operating system for a half century or more. Windows is not without its flaws and people have to be able to debug their programs, even when Windows is at fault. You cannot just shrug and say, "blame Microsoft".The antivirus industry would have a hard time preventing many attacks if they could not see the code. and watch the effects as it execute.
johnnysoftwareDec 5, 2009
Nope. What he is saying it straight up logic.
augustusosariDec 13, 2009
In before a 14-year-old hacks Windows 7 and finds it rigged for the Patriots.