The Paladin has been following a rather interesting story regarding some security features that were added to Windows Vista. It seems that two very respected security experts are claiming that a lot of the new protection added to Vista can be relatively easily bypassed (see the original story by clicking here).

You see, the engineers at Microsoft incorporated into Vista some advanced techniques of handling memory in order to make it difficult for “hackers” to be able to break Vista’s security by plucking important pieces of information out of memory. Techniques such as randomly relocating blocks of memory, or encrypting (scrambling) parts of memory are just some of the things they employed. However, it appears that after all of their clever work, a couple of computer scientists claim to have figured out a simple way to get around it all.

Now, before proceeding I should mention that the Paladin is NOT a fan of Vista at all! His general feelings about Vista are as follows:

• Vista is way too big (takes up too many resources). You are pretty much forced to have to make a major investment in upgrading your computer in order to run it
• Vista is way too expensive
• Vista is way too buggy! (it has too many problems)
• Vista is far too focused on trying to keep you from pirating vista, downloading music and videos, etc., than it is on doing the job it is supposed to. Namely, running your computer!

Of all of these problems, the Paladin feels that there is a basic software problem that most companies learned back in the 1980’s that Microsoft seems to have missed.

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Greetings Citizens of the Realm!

Today the Paladin wants to return to a subject that he wrote about a while back regarding the ability of US Customs Agents at our border having the right to look at the data that is on your computer whenever you try to enter, or reenter, the United States (see the original post by clicking here).

It turns out that things are even more dire than the Paladin originally thought!

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Whoa!

The Internet is a dangerous place indeed!

The Paladin was reading some posts over at the Internet Storm Center (you can check out the original post by clicking here) and was intrigued to find out that some tests were performed to see how long it took for a Windows XP computer to be infected/compromised by a worm or virus or other malicious software once it was placed on the public Internet. Their tests showed that it took an average of four minutes from the time the computer was placed on the public internet until the system was compromised!

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