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Microsoft maintains the announcement that Vista is the most secure
version of Windows it has ever released. According to the company the
security of Vista is superior to that of XP. This is partially owed to
the introduction of User Account Control (UAC), intended to prevent
users logged in without administrator rights continuously encountering
restrictions.
When administrator rights are solicited, Windows will perform a extra
checking back with the user. The purpose of this is the prevention of
malware from sneaking into the system.
Implementing
UAC, says Microsoft, has helped them to categorize 12 of the 23
security updates for Vista released in the last year as having slight
importance for the reason that, if a break-in occurred, malicious code
would not have had success in running with admin rights. Following a
research, Microsoft reports a 60 % decrease in malware infections
compared with XP.
Furthermore, Internet Explorer 7"s Protected
mode has reportedly done a great job preventing even more security
problems. As the company declares, the phishing filter, is currently
blocking over a million phishing attacks per week on browser users.
Another
aspect that tends to prove that Vista is more secure and that
Microsoft"s introduction of the Security Development Lifecycle is an
inspired and effective move, is the number of patches. Accordingly,
there were only fourteen updates to stop serious fissures in Vista in
the last year, while XP SP2 had 23. Moreover, Vista revealed only 36
vulnerabilities in any case – comparing to XP SP2"s 68.
Even
with the so much advertised security improvements, Vista fails to
become as popular as Microsoft intended. It seems that the culprit
might be high hardware requirements. Security specialist Thomas Dullien
declared that Vista indeed passed the tests as the toughest mainstream
operating system to crack that he had so far encountered.
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