__/ [ Nick Ballard ] on Saturday 23 December 2006 11:20 \__
> On Sat, 23 Dec 2006 01:13:30 +0100, Roy Culley wrote:
>
>> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2073611,00.asp
>>
>> Underground hackers are hawking zero-day exploits for Microsoft's
>> new Windows Vista operating system at $50,000 a pop, according to
>> computer security researchers at Trend Micro.
>>
>> The Windows Vista exploit - which has not been independently
>> verified - was just one of many zero-days available for sale at an
>> auction-style marketplace infiltrated by the Tokyo-based
>> anti-virus vendor.
>>
>> This was discussed on a mailing list, full disclosre I think. Someone
>> mantioned who would pay that amount of money for an exploit to an OS
>> that won't be widely adopted for momths if not a year or more. The
>> response was it was cheap. 0-day exploits for XP can bring in $100,000
>> or more.
>>
>> Is there no end to MS 'innovation'! :-)
>
> I guess Vista really will be profitable for third-party developers...
The humorous side of it is great, but we ought to be worried, no matter what
software or O/S we use. Yesterday I had a very long discussion with a
colleague of mine. E-mail has been rendered useless to many, the UK economy,
he says, loses around 50 billion pounds (dollars?) due to 'security' issues,
so sometimes I just think that we, as Linux advocated, should be happy(ier)
to find that Windows is becoming /more/ secure. In any event, I convinced
him to start using his Linux partition (everyone has one around here, but
surely Microsoft counts that as a Dell/Windows PC... one more for the stats
arguments).
--
~~ Kind greetings and happy holidays!
Roy S. Schestowitz | Windows: as good as Richard Stallman's dental higiene
http://Schestowitz.com | RHAT Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
1:20pm up 65 days 23:34, 6 users, load average: 0.48, 0.68, 0.82
http://iuron.com - Open Source knowledge engine project
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