Archive for the 'Security' Category
Microsoft: Vista More Secure Than XP and Open Source
Monday, January 28th, 2008Windows Vista was hit by significantly fewer publicly disclosed security flaws in its first year than Windows XP and open source rivals in their first years, according to a report from Microsoft. The report, written by Jeff Jones, a security strategy director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, is part of Microsoft’s effort to show that [...]
Windows Vista Security One Year Later
Thursday, January 24th, 2008Hi, Austin Wilson here. Now that Windows Vista has been available to business customers for more than a year, it’s a good time to go back and look at how it’s holding up from a security perspective. I think that it’s fair to say that Windows Vista is proving to be the most [...]
Security architecture of Windows Vista, Part 2
Thursday, January 24th, 2008Part 1 did not cover how processes generally acquire their permissions and integrity levels. According to the Windows security model, which is known from Vista predecessors, a child process normally inherits the access token of its parent. Vista adds one bit to this process in the access token, TOKEN_MANDATORY_POLICY_NEW_PROCESS_MIN, which is set for normal users [...]
Security architecture of Windows Vista, Part 1
Thursday, January 24th, 2008The mainstay of a secure operating system is access protection - the undesirable activities of malware (from the internet etc.) can only be blocked by preventing a free-for-all. With the user account control of Windows Vista, Microsoft is attempting to make it more palatable for the user to work with restricted rights. But even the [...]
Vista SP1 To Enhance Security, Block Piracy
Friday, December 21st, 2007Responding to feedback from customers and channel partners, Microsoft said today that the first service pack for Windows Vista will fight off known exploits as well as kill off its "reduced functionality mode," a feature that locks out what the system perceives to be unlicensed users. In a press release, Redmond said it’s making "changes [...]
Why I Turned Off Vista User Access Control
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007When Windows Vista was first released for retail purchase at the beginning of 2007, one of the most common complaints from new Vista users was that UAC (User Access Control) was a real hassle. Some users were really annoyed that Vista kept prompting them for the admin password, or for permission, when they tried to [...]
How to Recover a Lost Windows Password
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007The terms recover and lost are used to assist those using search engines in finding this article. This procedure will not technically allow you to “recover” your original password, though it will allow you to very quickly remove an existing password or create a new password so that you may regain access to your computer. [...]
The Secret Of UAC
Sunday, October 7th, 2007First of all, not running UAC is like staying logged in as root 100% of the time on a unix based system. Despite this, a lot of “advanced users” still choose to disable User Account Control in Vista. I’ll cover a few reasons for keeping UAC enabled here. One of the most obvious disadvantages is [...]
Vista SP1 offers no new features focuses on OS tweaks security
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), just delivered to a group of approximately 12,000 beta testers, offers no dramatic interface changes, nor does it add new features to the operating system. Instead SP1 focuses on improving performance, reliability and application compatibility, and it extends support to emerging hardware such as the exFAT file system that [...]
How to Change or Stop Password Expiration
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007This applies to the Vista Business and Vista Ultimate versions. By default, Vista is set up with passwords which will expire after 42 days. 14 days in advance, Vista will start warning you of this fact. NOTE: You must do this from within a Administrator account or use Run as administrator.
