Peter Wilson
Sun
warning I Canadian businesses are good at keeping up with digital security — both online and off — but they’re often doing it on outdated operating systems, and that means they can’t keep themselves safe with the latest technologies, according to a Microsoft expert.
“The security challenge in Canada is that generally we’re a little bit behind, for example, the U.S. and some other countries in technological adoption,” said Bruce Cowper, senior program manager, security initiative, Microsoft Canada
“The real challenge with that is that we’re not always deploying the latest revisions of the software, so perhaps we can’t take advantage of some of the latest technologies and security scenarios.”
In an interview, Cowper said that it concerns him that he’s still seeing older versions of Windows (like Windows 2000 and even earlier) in use at Canadian businesses.
“They’re very good at getting updates on their systems, but they’re updating older systems. For instance, they’re not using [Windows] XP with service pack 2, they’re not using the latest technologies.”
And, with the upcoming launch of Windows Vista, Cowper said he’s concerned that Canadian businesses, and even individual users, might just stay with what they have.
“I’m wondering if people are going to say, ‘You know what, Windows in whatever version we’ve got is good enough for what we need.’ And they’re doing that without looking at the situation and saying, ‘Actually, if I want to give the user the best, secure and most reliable experience, this is what I need to go for.’ “
He said that while companies tend to look at external threats flowing in to them from the Internet, a lot of the problems for corporations lie within.
“There’s the old example that if you present somebody with a screen that says ‘click here to see the dancing pigs and, oh, by the way, we’re going to infect your machine with a virus’ the probability is that they don’t know which one to choose so they think ‘oh, I’d better click here to see the dancing pigs.’ “
Windows Vista, said Cowper, is designed so that the end user doesn’t have to make those kinds of decisions.
“The user doesn’t have to think about it quite so much and isn’t presented with a lot of boxes saying ‘yes, no, are you sure, are you really sure?”
One of the security advances in Vista and in Internet Explorer 7, which also comes with XP, is an anti-phishing filter, which studies Websites for signs that they’re phishing sites and also refers either to an in-computer, or better yet, an external, constantly updated list of known phishing sites.
Cowper said that businesses may find they don’t have to do much of an upgrade of present hardware to run Vista, perhaps just a better graphics card or more memory.
As well, he added, the original outlay for hardware would be compensated for over time by the amount of money that can be saved with using Vista.
“It’s a lot easier for businesses if they don’t have to spend vast amounts of time reconfiguring or patching, updating and locking down systems.
“Ultimately, as a user you’re buying an experience, not just a computer with software on it. And you expect everything to work, to be secure by default and have as much of a rich experience as possible right from the get go, without having to spend vast amounts of time customizing and fiddling to get it up and running.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
