Sophos blog on Windows 7 security

[studiot]

http://www.sophos.com/blogs/chetw/g/...-8-10-viruses/

comments and character makeup

[NickCat11]

Oh well................

[bytebuster]

70% of PCs run XP! Wow. That established base is not going anywhere anytime soon. It seems that only 2 out of 9 users bothered to switch to Vista, and those people likely bought new PCs with it preinstalled. Vista came out just before the economic meltdown, which is not a good recipe for market penetration.

[NYJimbo]

I think you are about to see a huge wave of computers coming in for repair over the next few months running Windows 7.

If you do go DELL and try to order a laptop they now only offer Windows 7. I couldnt find any offering XP or Vista, thats a pretty sudden change and there will not be any "XP downgrade" offers anymore. what makes me laugh is that the standard protection on these is "McAfee Security Center". I just had a DELL in here this week that was infected with over a dozen viruses and it had MSC running, with a paid license, and it didnt seem to think the machine was infected with anything.

So once these machines get into the users hands and they have had a chance to run through the internet they will start showing just exactly how secure they are.

[ProTech Support]

I don't really see what the "surprise" is here. I mean did you expect Windows 7 to come with a strong anti-virus suite or something?

Yes, it may be something smart for Microsoft to do, but we all know how that goes....

Just business as usual. Stack up the a/v software.

[commodore64]

I agree with seeing more win 7 soon, ive already had several upgrades and i have many customers who were waiting to get a new cpu until windows 7 was out. I made sure for the last year to talk about it alot to customers to get them excited to run it when it came out, and so far, so good business wise.

[studiot]

If you do go DELL and try to order a laptop they now only offer Windows 7.

Funny that as I have several customers with new Dells, trying to batter Dell's door down for their copy of Windows 7.

Last month over here Dell issued pcs with Vista plus an upgrade to 7 (by Dec 30th).

Now apparantly they won't respond to requests for the upgrade.

They did this with Vista/XP when Vista came out.

[MrUnknown]

This is a horrible blog post.

If I wrote an application that spat out a ton of pop ups telling you your computer is infected and asking for money, sent it to you, and you ran it, guess what you have. Do they expect Windows to figure out what the application is going to do before running it?

If I wrote that same application for OS X or Linux, the same thing would happen. The major difference there is (at least on Linux, I don't know too much about OS X) not every program running can add something like a startup script to the system unless they are root or in a certain group. However, on all of these systems (OS X, Linux and Windows) I could write a program that encrypted any found document that looked slightly important to the user and blackmail them to pay me money to decrypt it. I don't see an article about that.

edit: don't get me wrong, MS can do a lot to make some things more secure without killing backwards compatibility. for example, making adding a startup program a UAC prompt. And I know that overall the design of Windows is less secure. I just think the article is being misleading by basically saying "Look! Windows 7 runs programs!" after all, that's all a virus is.

[bytebuster]

Originally Posted by NYJimbo

I think you are about to see a huge wave of computers coming in for repair over the next few months running Windows 7.

If you do go DELL and try to order a laptop they now only offer Windows 7. I couldnt find any offering XP or Vista, thats a pretty sudden change and there will not be any "XP downgrade" offers anymore. what makes me laugh is that the standard protection on these is "McAfee Security Center". I just had a DELL in here this week that was infected with over a dozen viruses and it had MSC running, with a paid license, and it didnt seem to think the machine was infected with anything.

So once these machines get into the users hands and they have had a chance to run through the internet they will start showing just exactly how secure they are.

My experience is that people run their PCs with no malware protection or default protection until something goes obviously wrong and they can't use the PC or access the net. Then they come crying to us. I give it until spring before we start seeing PCs running 7 that are so clogged that we need to run virus scans from UBCD to clean them.

[NYJimbo]

Originally Posted by bytebuster

My experience is that people run their PCs with no malware protection or default protection until something goes obviously wrong and they can't use the PC or access the net. Then they come crying to us. I give it until spring before we start seeing PCs running 7 that are so clogged that we need to run virus scans from UBCD to clean them.

No doubt we will see them. I just got a DC jack job this morning which turned out to be just a AC adapter problem. Upon booting the machine with a good adapter the machine was full of popups and running on the bottom right was the good old red "M" icon for McAffee Security Center

Last virus database update July 07, 2007.

I told the customer his DC jack was fine but his machine was full of viruses, he told me he knows but it still seems to work ok. I was about to warn him about all the stuff that is going on without him knowing (stealing info from him, his machine being used as a zombie or bot, etc..) but I just shut up and walked away. This machine had "M" installed and when the license ran out they never updated, but I am curious about the "07/07/07" last update. Its running Vista with the UAC turned on so it looks like the machine is protecting them, but sure enough its infected. I don't care, he took it home as is.

We will see Windows 7 boxes come in just like that. Running "Microsoft Security Essentials" or something "out of the box" and the machines will be packed with viruses and crap.

Amazing.