Our Editor in Chief Marilyn Cohodas posed some questions on the state of malware prevention in the industry to our readers in her weekly editorial. Below is one of the responses. Read the original editorial.
From R.M.
I have been receiving the TechTarget list for about five months now, and it is a good resource to keep up. I appreciate all the stories, opinions and information.
I left the Network Admin/Engineer Field two years ago because I was so burnt out on Microsoft and the constant problems. My experience is from early DOS days thru to Windows 2K3 server.
Your article makes a couple good points, and a couple that are missed:
The point of the event viewer and why should users have to pay more for the lemon we all
know as Microsoft.
The point of do enterprises even need more tools from Microsoft, being things seem under control.
Two other points you might want to add that contribute to this and might derail Microsoft's idiotic parade of making like they know anything about security and how to write tools for it.
First point, if your enterprise servers are getting viruses and malware, your servers need to be relocated and separated from Internet access. Another bonehead problem with W2K3 Server is need for Internet to validate. Enterprise servers in production have no business accessing the Internet, patches, downloads, updates should be done externally and pushed down to the servers from another machine or segment.
Second point, Microsoft operating systems should have already had built-in antivirus and malware fighting tools. Add-ons are worthless from them because they are just faint copies of the best tools on the market.
This is a side point, someone should have smacked the designer of Outlook and Outlook Express when the first wave of viruses began hitting, Outlook and Outlook Express are single handedly responsible for the proliferation of viruses. First, because the dang thing is programmed in VB, and second, because it's set up to open files automatically and has no internal security.
This is just my opinion, like many out there. I know there are Microsoft Bashers galore, and I guess I fall into that category, but there is a point in time when someone in the industry needs to see the trees instead of the forest and dump lemon unsecured software for something better.
MAC OS, and LINUX distros are not the Holy Grail, but they sure are a start, heck ask IBM.
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