03.12.09
Department of Homeland Security ‘Poisoned’ by Microsoft; Vista 7 is Open to Hijackers Again
Summary: Microsoft employee put inside the Department of Homeland Security; more flaws in BetaVista 7 are found (another one last year)
AS WAS SHOWN before, agenda can change radically when an alternation in leadership comes into play, particularly when there is influence from prior employers like Microsoft.
Security insanity [1, 2] is not foreign to this company from Redmond, which had its software put in critical systems despite the fact that militaries too had become victims of Windows [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
One of the major clients of Red Hat1 — apart from Wall Street — is the US Department of Defence. It’s therefore rather disturbing to see that the company where “products just aren’t engineered for security” has one of its people — ironically enough — become a security chief at a national level.
The Department of Homeland Security today appointed a senior Microsoft Corp. executive to head a section charged with protecting the federal government’s computer networks from cyber attacks.
Phil Reitinger, currently “chief trustworthy infrastructure strategist” at Microsoft, will become deputy undersecretary of DHS’s National Protections Program division.
What will this mean for procurement? We already know how far Microsoft goes to defend or to warp the perception of Windows security.
In reality, as it turned out in yesterday’s news, not even a version of Windows with near-zero market share can be secured (thus farewell to the mythology of security due only to scarcity). BetaVista 7 has already critical flaws.
Microsoft Corp. patched the first critical vulnerability in Windows 7 Tuesday as it rolled out an update that fixes three flaws in the new operating system’s kernel.
The writer is probably not correct. Maybe it was prior to the beta and maybe it was not, but Vista 7 suffered from "critical" flaws before.
It’s just like Vista all over again. █
____
1 Or GNU/Linux in general, although Red Hat is almost a de facto standard in this area.
