windows7ROAR

is it marketing or is it really more secure? June 25, 2010

Now I know what it’s like to work in school environments and just for the record folks, most  SysAdmins out there don’t get summers off– even if they work for a school district!    Summers are for regrouping before the next wave of eager learners arrive :)  

Last week I spent an hour or so consulting with a school administrator who maintains one of those school-like networks– you know: the kind with ever changing requirements, tight budgets, and high-touch-and-go users (many of whom are masked as sweet little children– but underneath some of these sweet faces are little villains who make it their job to attempt to “beat” the system on a daily basis).   

 And so here we were, talking about Windows and schools and to my great surprise he told me that he hadn’t had any malware issues this past year.  My jaw dropped.  Really?  Yes,- no malware even though our students are all over the web and into god-knows-what.  Oh, this is a school so it would be all those Macintosh PCs were talking about.  Right?  No, Windows.   Ok, so how can this be, I asked.  Answer: VISTA.  “I really like Vista, despite what people say” he said. 

Yeah, OK, some of you might be walking away from this post right now (I thought this was a Windows 7 blog?) but the story is simple.  Standard users and the UAC does work.  Yes, the experts and pundits provide plenty of point\counter-point on top of  it’s so “cool” to lament how VISTA is the most annoying (*sigh*– I heard this one just yesterday).  But this guy is no rookie or Microsoft fan-boy.   And his story says alot. 

I don’t think this guys experience is all that unusual either- especially if you look at Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report  from earlier this year.   Who knows?  The UAC & Vista\Win7 release just might change people’s perceptions of security around Windows.  Perhaps those lame generalizations people resort to will also fall into memory. 

Scene from the future:

OldGuy (onHover-Porch): “Yeah, remember back in ’05, I got myself in the worse tangle.  The epic.worm.trojan infected every XP machine and I single-handededly restored 2 TB of user’s data, including the stuff in my boss’s shoes.”

OtherOldGuy (a hologram-projection from the Hover-Porch’s mobile screen powered by XBOX and Kinect 4.0 no less) “Oh, yeah, I remember the ihateu.slam.melissa.  But you know, we never had a problem after ’10.  Yeah, clean shorts and smiling faces after we moved everyone out of the Administrators group.  Wanted to do that for years and then along came . . . “ 

Well, I’ll stop there.  You get the idea.