Hacker: Microsoft More Secure Than Apple, Adobe

From: Tom's Hardware

April 16, 2010


Microsoft is doing things better than Apple and Adobe, according to a career hacker.

Marc Maiffret got into hacking not long after he got his first computer as a schoolboy, and by age 17, he was a known hacker who was greeted one morning by an FBI agent who held a gun to his face.

Since then, Maiffret turned his life around and helped to co-found eEye Digital Security, a company dedicated to finding security flaws in Microsoft's software. Last December, he joined anti-malware firm FireEye as chief security architect.

For all his work trying to find holes in Microsoft's products, Maiffret now says that the Windows maker has the best practices when it comes to software security.

"Now when you look at Microsoft today they do more to secure their software than anyone. They're the model for how to do it. They're not perfect; there's room for improvement. But they are definitely doing more than anybody else in the industry, I would say," Maiffret told CNet in an interview. "From an internal process in how they go about auditing their code and securing software from a technical perspective, they do have one of the best models. The area they still have room for improvement is around time lines of how long it takes for them to fix things."

Maiffret is now pointing to Adobe and Apple as being companies who are lacking in the security department. "They are starting to get black eyes with people saying Adobe is a bigger worry than Microsoft is at the moment, which I agree with. As those things are happening, Adobe and Apple and other companies are starting to pay attention and care more. But a year ago, it was still very much a marketing thing. People from both companies treated it as a marketing problem. They didn't have good technical structures behind the scenes."

Apple has hired an industry-noted security employee formerly of Microsoft, but Maiffret still says that Apple's very much behind when it comes to security. "They've really only begun in the last six months or so taking security seriously and understanding that it impacts their business in a serious way."
Referring to Apple, Maiffret said,"It's even a little scarier with them because they try to market themselves as more secure than the PC, that you don't have to worry about viruses, etc. Anytime there's been a hacking contest, within a few hours someone's found a new Apple vulnerability. If they were taking it seriously, they wouldn't claim to be more secure than Microsoft because they are very much not. And the Apple community is pretty ignorant to the risks that are out there as it relates to Apple. The reason we don't see more attacks out there compared to Microsoft is because their market share isn't near what Microsoft's is."

Maiffret continued, "I think Microsoft does a better job with their code auditing than folks like Apple do. We've only seen a scratching of the surface as far as Apple vulnerabilities because nobody cares to find them. There's nothing inherent with Apple themselves and their development. The only reason Apple gets little increase in security is because they're running on top of a Unix-based operating system and they can take advantage of some of the things that have been done for them."

SOURCE

A great article, Nibiru! It confirms my suspicions about Adobe. Many blame ActiveX for being a security flaw, and to a degree it is, but Adobe is just as much, if not more, of a security threat. I have been reading about this from various sources for over a year now. If Foxit could produce software that can do everything that Adobe can, they could take over Adobe's base of customers. But I don't see it happening, Adobe has more programs than a PDF reader and Flash for IE & other OS's. It would be hard to kick them to the curb, but I read a recent article where Steve Jobs had done so, whether it was Apple's whole line of products, or one of their expensive gadgets, I can't remember. I do remember there was a problem between Jobs and Adobe.

Still there are a lot of things to be improved. Microsoft cannot stand against Redhat linux enterprise in matters of security ! Its a long way to go .

I run Mint 8 myself, it's fairly secure too. Plus, most anything you need is within the package manager. Linux OS's are picky about printers, though. But other than that, Mint 8 is a fine OS, too. It's currently the 4th most used one in the world, behind Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows. Not bad for a free OS. Very speedy, too.

Linux Mint is a nice OS so to is Mandriver, Linux can make a nice change in a dual boot option.

Yes it can, Veedaz. Mint makes an excellent dual boot on this desktop. It even found a newer video driver than I have installed on Windows 7. The screen is noticeably clearer, and it's a snappy OS. Too, it can make an older computer look much better, and it usually finds all of your drivers for you. Linux can never replace Windows for me, but some of the mainstream OS's that are around, there's no reason not to run them. You don't need to add on so much security, they are fairly secure out of the box. I do have Klam AV on it.

Can Mint 8 handle RAID? I made the mistake sometime ago of installing MINT 6 on my machine and broke the RAID.

I had to do a little researching on that question, Mychael. With the way that is setup, I can't promise you that you won't break anything. That appears to be an older technology, and one I don't want to fool with. But I'm sure that you can install it in a VM, Sun has a good free one. But you are planning to dual boot between XP Pro & Windows 7, aren't you? Other than the GRUB bootloader being installed, and a different format (ext3 or ext4), I see no other differences. I may can give a better answer if you tell me something. What type of hard drive(s) are you going to be using? This RAID deal may not be the best option for you, especially if you have a large, modern hard drive.

Well what had happend was that I had my XP machine running with mirrored Raid on two HDD. When I tried installing MINT6 it saw the two drives as one. Put a bit of itself on both and effectively killed both itself and the Windows as when I tried a reboot Mint was looking on only one drive but had also corrupted the boot sectors for my Windows over both drives. We recovered the windows OS but could not re-initiate the RAID.
The drives were Western digital velociraptors.

For the new system, yes a dual boot of both ' 7' and XP. Have not decided on the drives as yet.
Mirror RAID if it works properly is great as essentially you have two drives with identical data running all the time. If one dies you can remove it and then copy back across from the other to have two duplicate drives again.

For what it's worth, next time I install a Linux distro I'm going to install to a separate hard drive and choose the drive through my BIOS boot drive function.

That way there will be no dual-boot software to install. Just about a minute to change it in the BIOS and reboot.