Vista - More or less secure than ever?

I notice a TON of Vista bashing, and one of the biggest bashing is the Vista security...

Alot of people think that Vista will be less secure in the long run... And they got this from security companies... Nevermind that these companies are bascially saying 'You must buy our product to get security', and if Vista worked it would put them out of business, so what they say you hafta take with a grain of salt...

But I just noticed something... I care about security, but I also care about other stuff... I was just visiting one of my favorite no cd sites, which will remain nameless, but alot of you probably know what they are. I don't think it's wrong as long as you own the game, and I buy all my stuff...

Please, don't get into an argument about ethics. This topic is about something else.

I never go to the bad sites, but even the safe sites have tracking cookies. And some of the cracks have trojans in them. It's not really a safe thing to mess with, and you can seriously screw with your system.

I use a hardware firewall, a software firewall, nod32, rootkit revealer, a-squared, ccleaner, windows defender, hijackthis... I'm not as crazy as redsensistar about protection but I'm very very crazy.

Well, just now I noticed something interesting...

Everytime I visit these sites my xp systems get lots of tracking cookies. They did again, this time one did a huge number, 18 , but my Vista machines were intact , as if nothing has happened to them.

And yes, if you have a network, things can easily bounce. It happens when you get a virus, or a trojan, or even spyware.

I also accidentally got a file with a trojan in it And vista succesfully blocked it . Not the windows firewall, or even zone alarm, has done that in the past, in Xp!

I've ran file scans on all my pcs, and nothing broke thru. The last time something like this happened, I had to format all my pcs

*sigh* What a bunch of crap you have to go thru just to play the games YOU PAID FOR without cds...

 

The analysis says that Vista only blocks one-third of the attacks.And this has been confirmed by different sources.However, what you say to be doing is what many people do.No big deal.But I wonder what would you do with something like blaster.
Read this.

 

I think there is little doubt that as a whole Vista is more secure than XP. It is however not more efficient in gaming, where the excess consumption of resources prevents focused allocation to actual graphics rendering. This will change as developers and manufacturers adapt more to the new OS.

Any OS needs a transitional period of time, but I expect Vista to be successful. I think if Apple had the same amount of users like Microsoft, you'd be hearing a lot more about security problems.

 

Cookies are accepted (or not accepted) by the browser. And yes, IE7 is a lot better than IE6. But both are available on XP anyway, so I doubt that's going to make a difference.

As mujtaba said, some recent tests have shown Vista's built-in security mechanisms to be pretty spotty.

As for the trojan? Of course a firewall wouldn't block that. That's not what firewalls do. That's what antivirus-scanners do. And they usually do that pretty well. And, in my experience, they catch that sort of thing under XP as well.

Furthermore, I have my doubts about how much the UAC is going to improve things in the end. Gosh, people have to press ok a few more times when they install software? And of course we all know your average computer user *never* does that without carefully analyzing the situation to figure out if it's safe...... *Especially* when it doesn't clearly state exactly what it ineeds approval to do.
I predict that the vast majority of Vista users are going to either turn UAC off, or just press ok every time it pops up, as blindly as people press ok to accept downloads, email attachments, viruses, or even the Winzip nag screen....

Still, I don't see why Vista would be *less* secure than a vanilla XP installation. (Obviously, if you stick enough firewalls and antivirus scanners on an XP installation, and also only accepts the downloads you know are safe, XP won't get infected either) I just don't think it's as invincible as MS likes to pretend either.

Really? People jumped to Win2k and XP pretty darned quickly. Mac OS is also usually accepted almost instantaneously.

Of course. That's like saying you expect people to buy more cars. When everyone has 30 years worth of software that *only* runs on Microsoft OS'es, it's pretty obvious that people will upgrade no matter what.

Definitely, but that's not exactly the subject of this thread, is it?

 

Once again though, it's the word of a company who vista could possibly take money from.

It's listening to the Apple commercials. Or listening to Alot of people.

You gotta take it with a grain of salt.

I've just had Vista block a trojan for me. Xp didn't do that. I'm seriously considering disabling most of my systems, and sending a few viruses/trojans to one xp and 1 vista machien and see what happens...

And then reformat.

But of course, no one would listen to anything postive for vista :-\

 

Of course. Just like the claim that Vista is more secure comes from the company who could possibly make money from talking people into switching to Vista. I'd take both with a grain of salt.

But XP has antivirus apps to solve the same problem. But yes, out of the box, with no third-party software installed, Vista is certainly more secure.
But really, who runs XP without an antivirus app and a firewall? And would you recommend running Vista without those as well?

I wouldn't. As said above, Vista's built in security mechanisms only catch roughly a third of current viruses.

It is certainly more secure than the hypothetical blank XP box (which no one would ever use anyway), but that's not really the issue. Is it more secure than the XP setups people actually *use*? That's the important question. Or rather, how much does it take to bring Vista up to that level? Does it need a standalone antivirus client? Standalone firewall? Third-party browser?

Except that none of the above replies actually refused to listen, which kinda ruins *that* particular line of whining...

 

I'm trying to write javascript to parse some xml from an rss feed and there's some permission error in Vista that's preventing me from either accessing the feed or writing the xml to file. Yeah the exception thrown just says "error" and the message says "permission denied". Turned off UAC and everything, I'm admin with full privileges, no luck.

Anyone have any ideas?