Windows® 7 facing thorny real-life security issues

The long-acclaimed "best version of Windows ever", as Steve Ballmer enthusiastically called it last week at the International Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, reached the 7000 build and its public beta, with both supporters and critics.

Professional testers, IT&C geeks, as well as snoopy average Joe users almost caused a genuine Denial-of-Service when rushed last weekend to frantically download the latest OS version of the Redmond-based corporation and literally blocked Microsoft's servers.

Eight years after the introduction of XP®, currently the most extensively used operating system in the world, and two years after the "painful" Vista® experience, the very first clicks and browses foretell a possible success story for Microsoft®. Users report having positive experiences, with a significantly reduced boot-up time, more effective memory usage, as well as an improved Web browsing experience. More important, it looks like Windows 7 is totally capable to run on most netbooks, since it is more robust and suitable for the Intel Atom-based machines, even compared to its XP ancestor (keep the fingers crossed not to be another Vista capable story).

Still, there is at least one chapter where Windows 7 did not perform well - security. Less than a week after the beta release, Microsoft issued a first update (please do read "patch") that concerns a possible MP3 files corruption, but did not patch a Denial-of-Service vulnerability that could also affect the Windows 7 Beta users.

Meanwhile, different security solutions experience difficulties in dealing with the beta OS due to new API components. Users of some McAfee and Symantec products were not able to deploy and run their defensive applications on a freshly installed copy of Windows 7 for compatibility reasons (although Norton^TM is listed as an official Windows 7 security software provider).

Whether Windows 7 will pass the security tests or not is too early to tell after a simple glance at the Beta. Probably the end of 2009 (or the beginning of 2010?) and the advent of the official release will tell us more. Until then, with the hope that Microsoft security response policy will improve and Windows 7 will keep its agile shape, we can only welcome it and hope for the best in terms of systems security - "Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light."