Report: Windows 7 is Hard to Hack if Administrators Correctly Handle Rights

From DailyTech: A new study by security researchers at BeyondTrust gives Microsoft's Windows 7 a thumbs up when it comes to security. It finds that while the hundreds of thousands of active malicious users worldwide (if not millions) may be able, in some cases, to compromise the operating system, the risk of that happening can be greatly reduced with proper rights administration.

That may sound like common sense. However, for years Windows has been the butt of jokes from the likes of Apple, Inc. and others for being "insecure" and "full of viruses".

And to some extent some of that criticism was apt. Windows for more than a decade has been the world's most used operating system, with over a billion active Windows users operating today. That means that attacks from cybercriminals focused on Windows users, rather than focusing on Mac users, who enjoy a comparatively small market share, in many respects. And while past versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista were relatively secure, often times they were not secure enough to safeguard users from all dangers.

Proper management of administrative rights -- regardless of the OS -- has always been a good way to minimize attacks. On Windows 7, though, which comes packed with new memory protections, BeyondTrust says that rights management can prevent not just some, but nearly all security risks.

It found in its study that 90% of Windows 7 vulnerabilities to date and 100% of Microsoft Office vulnerabilities found last year could have been safeguarded against by taking away users' administrative rights. Doing so would have also have protected against 94 percent of Internet Explorer vulnerabilities and 100 percent of Internet Explorer 8 vulnerabilities. This is especially pertinent as hackers from China used flaws in Internet Explorer 6 to steal data from Google in late 2009.

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