Summary: New security policies sought by politicians as a 10-year old Windows flaw surfaces

A FEW days ago we wrote about the enormous cost of Windows being as insecure as it is. A 10-year old flaw has been reported in Windows and this one firm considers it perhaps the worst in a decade. Not everyone agrees, but here is the claim anyway.

A new Windows-based denial of service attacks reportedly exploits a 10-year old OS flaw to crash vulnerable systems.

[...]

2X, which is not well known in the world of information security research, issued a press release over its discovery on Wednesday billing it "one of the biggest security vulnerabilities in the Windows OS for many years".

The state of Windows botnets is alarming authorities:

The official British view casts ongoing talks between the US and Russia - aimed at fostering cooperation between states on internet security and agreeing ground rules - in a pessimistic light.

[...]

"The increasing sophistication of criminal cyber tools and the availability of cheap, fast broadband will mean that states are able to achieve their aims by hiring criminal botnets to carry out DDOS or other attacks on their enemies' infrastructure."

Governments may use this to pass new draconian laws and Microsoft can pass discriminatory measures to address a problem that its own negligence [1, 2, 3] has created. The US cybersecurity czar is former Microsoft employee Howard Schmidt [1, 2, 3], so this new US push for "government cybersecurity authority" might be trouble for Free desktops. ⬆