Security Response

“Microsoft Windows Vista is the most secure and trustworthy Windows operating system yet.” This notion seems to be the foundation of the many media articles on the upcoming Windows Vista release that have been written over the past year or so. This tagline is probably a fairly accurate statement based on general testing of the Vista Community Technology Preview (CTP) distributions and on the functional security feature set provided in Vista, as specified by Microsoft. Windows Vista will likely be more secure out of the box than Windows 2003, XP, 2000, or NT were during their initial releases.

However accurate the above notion is, the technology industry pundits, editorialists, and “expert” analysts have managed to translate the aforementioned would-be truth about Vista into a more general statement. This statement is that Vista is a highly secured and hardened operating system that may well be impenetrable and impervious to attack, one that...