Summary: Windows problems in Britain and Australia

THIS post can be kept extremely short by just linking to the news reports at hand. The first one comes from the British press:

O2 caught in smartphone virus outbreak

[...]

The TG01 runs Windows Mobile Professional 6.1 and we'd not expect there to be too many forms of malware targeting that platform.

The second report comes from a nation where the government is deep inside Microsoft's pocket and therefore a lot of government Web sites run Windows.

The Royal Australian Air Force has confirmed that a hacker defaced its website on 13-14 July, in an attack the perpetrator described as a warning message to stop racism against Indian students in Australia.

In USENET, Ian Hilliard writes in reference to the above:

The cracker is threatening to deface more sites if the Australian government does not do more to protect Indian students. Given that the defacer wrote "pawn" instead of "pwn", it is very likely that the site was not defaced by some hard core "cracker".

The problem is that Windows 2003 and IIS are just so easy to crack. This weakness is being used by criminal elements to inject malicious code into main-stream web pages to in turn take over control of client computers running Windows.

Q: What is the main-stream response to all this? A: NOTHING!!!

Somehow the world has been conned into believing that it is normal that software is shoddy and insecure. I guess that there are simply too many pigs with their snout in the Windows trough for anything to change in the foreseeable future.

Yesterday we showed that British Windows servers were also behind DDOS attacks on Korea/United States. Will they ever learn? The public at large is kept misinformed, but technology-savvy people are not equally gullible. In fact, according to new research, satisfaction ratings for Microsoft are extremely low.

Microsoft, Verizon rate low among IT pros

[...]

Among IT professionals questioned, Microsoft's customer satisfaction ratings for the second quarter dropped in three key areas.

Microsoft spinners like Preston Gralla already try to blame Microsoft "hate" for this embarrassing finding, distracting from the issue that Microsoft's products are really inherently poor and it has nothing to do with love or hate. ⬆

"Usually Microsoft doesn't develop products, we buy products. It's not a bad product, but bits and pieces are missing."

--Arno Edelmann, Microsoft's European business security product manager