stupid vendor tricks

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

...... Forwarded Message .......
From: "Matthew T. Blackmon" <matthew () blackmon org>
To: dave () farber net
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 11:57:30 -0400
Subj: RE: [IP] stupid vendor tricks

Dave-

This should come to no one as a surprise. Back in December, the SANS group
released a paper titled "Windows XP: Surviving the First Day." It can be
found at http://isc.incidents.org/presentations/xpsurvivalguide.pdf 

Generally speaking, most of the system vendors I deal with only bring
machines up to the most-recent service release. 

This underscores the problem inherent in the release-and-patch policy that
Microsoft, and many other, software makers have.

On the same topic, my aunt and uncle purchased a new Dell about 15 months
ago. I was visiting them at the time, so I made a point of setting up their
machine, bringing it up-to-date on patches, and set up automatic download
and install of Windows updates. While visiting them last week, I ended up
spending eight hours one day trying to remove a host of malware, adware, and
trojans from their machine. I have complete confidence in saying that if
they had tried to handle it themselves, they'd have never made it to the end
of it (Dell's tech support would have likely asked them to reinstall the
image from the included CD-ROM).

In this day and age, the computer is priced and marketed as an appliance. As
such, we need to demand of software makers and system integrators that they
make them as secure and easy to operate as your average refrigerator.

Matthew

-----Original Message-----

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