Friday 13 August 2010

Inadequate Security

It’s no surprise that in a recent survey of 488 IT workers, according to IT PRO, two thirds of them claim that security is not mission critical to their company. Tom Gaffney of F-Secure thinks that desktop security is a non-starter:

Gaffney expressed concerns over whether top level executives will ever recognise how important security is.

“I am very skeptical they ever will. That is the reality we have seen already in the desktop world,” he told IT PRO. “I don’t think it will be just one event that will change things.”

Desktop security IS on the agenda for companies that must adhere to regulatory requirements and for others that understand the key to preventing malware is to eliminate administrative privileges.

Secure Windows started with Vista

According to Microsoft’s Crispin Cowan, Vista Paved the Way for Secure Windows. He also notes that:

“If you are running as administrator, security is fairly hopeless," he said. Unfettered administrative rights is what allowed malware and viruses to take control of computers.

He continues:

Vista, featured a total separation between what a user can do on a machine and what an administrator can do, a separation that has always been enforced on Unix distributions. This separation, enforced by UAC, limits the damage that a user can do to a machine.

Tuesday 10 August 2010

Google makes Chrome browser available as MSI file

While I still believe that Internet Explorer 8 is the right choice of browser for business use at the current time, Google has taken one step forward in making its popular Chrome browser enterprise friendly by making available an MSI installer package. Most importantly, unlike the consumer version, the MSI installs Chrome to the protected Program Files directory, making one installation of Chrome available to all users of the same system and easier to update when deployed across enterprise systems. Needless to say, an MSI file is also helpful when using Group Policy Software Installation or other enterprise-class deployment system. Download the Chrome MSI for enterprise deployment here.

You should note that at the time of writing, the MSI version of Chrome is a beta of version 6.