Marketing blunders of our time

Microsoft - Windows XP is the most secure operating system ever

At the launch of Windows XP back in October 2001, Microsoft heralded the new version of its operating system as the most secure ever. Bill Foundstone, an engineer at Microsoft, said that:

"Windows Xp can provide the strongest network security available."

One of the major problems plaguing operating systems, buffer overflows, had been cut out in XP, according to MS:

"The software giant earlier proclaimed Windows XP to be its most secure operating system ever. Jim Allchin, group vice president of Windows, said special attention was paid to buffer overflows.

"We have gone through all code and, in an automated way, found places where there could be buffer overflow, and those have been removed in Windows XP," he told eWeek."

Oh, the joys of hindsight. That quote was to come back and bite them in the ass!

The world at large started to suspect that things were up merely two months after XP's launch. You guessed it - 'XP flaw due to 'buffer overflow'.

"A 'buffer overflow' made public Thursday in Microsoft's Windows XP, for instance, could allow hackers to take over a computer and erase disks, alter data and install their own programs."

The rest, as they say, is history. Windows XP has now had 180 security bulletins since its release - that's one every other week. Any definition of 'secure' would struggle to include that.

Of course, as Steve Gibson pointed out in a recent podcast, it's a misnomer to pronounce that something is 'secure' when it is released. Security is something that is proven over time, not predicted or hoped. Windows is more secure now than it was, since it sports a large amount of patches and service packs that all help cut down the amount of vulnerabilities. But it's still stretching the definition to say that it is, per se, secure.

Unfortunately, there's little to suggest that Microsoft has learned from its mistakes. Recent speeches and interviews given by Allchin - who you think would be having second thoughts after getting burned last time around - have pronounced Windows Vista as the the most secure Windows yet. Of course, given that Vista's network software has been totally rewritten from scratch, this is a little hard to believe, especially given that the new 'virgin' code contains elementary mistakes that were long-ago fixed on Windows XP, and even on Windows 2000.

For anyone who thought that bad security was going to become a thing of the past, don't get your hopes up.