Tuesday, April 04, 2006

microsoft says escape from wet paper bag becoming impossible

holy crap, have you heard the news? microsoft has proclaimed that it's becoming impossible to recover from malware..

yeah, of course you've heard the news... everyone and their grandmother seems to think it's a big deal that microsoft is saying security is too hard...

microsoft is basically citing windows rootkits, advanced spyware, and anything else that might hook the kernal as the reason why recovery from malware is going to supposedly become impossible... in the malware world those things all boil down to stealth techniques, and as i've already said - we solved the stealth problem over a decade ago... microsoft, being deaf, blind, and monumentally stupid, made that solution basically unusable by foisting NTFS on us without giving us a solution for booting from a known clean removable medium and parsing NTFS partitions (before NTFS we could just boot from a write protected, bootable floppy disk and access the drive from DOS without triggering any malware self-defense mechanisms and without allowing the malware's stealth capabilities to be activated)...

the really weird thing is that microsoft does have the technology... it's called a PE (Preinstalled Environment) disk and not only does microsoft not want to give it away for free or bundle it with the operating system to aid in maintenance and disaster recovery, but they actually got on the case of the maker(s) of the BartPE disk (a free alternative to microsoft's own PE disk) a couple years ago, forcing the product temporarily offline...

lots of folks are taking microsoft's proclaimation seriously - don't buy into their cop-out... the handful of years they've spent trying to catch up in the security field are apparently just not enough for them to realize they have the solution in their own grubby little hands... the malware problem is not as bad as those morons in redmond make it out to be...

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