Windows Vista Security
Microsoft is making fundamental investments in technology to help make customers more secure. Efforts include using a security development lifecycle to develop more secure software and providing technology innovation in the platform to provide layered defense, or defense-in-depth.
Windows Vista includes many security features and improvements to protect client computers from the latest generation of threats, including worms, viruses, and other malicious software (collectively known as malware).
User Account Control allows users to be productive and change common settings while running as a standard user, without requiring administrative privileges. This prevents users from making potentially dangerous changes to their computers, without limiting their ability to run applications
from phishing and spoofing attacks. New features include protected mode Internet Explorer, which helps protect user data and configuration settings from being deleted or changed by malicious Web sites or malware.
Windows Defender detects many types of potentially suspicious software and can prompt the user before allowing applications to make potentially malicious changes.
The new outbound filtering in the firewall provides administrative control over peer-to-peer sharing applications and other similar applications that businesses want to restrict.
Windows Service Hardening limits the damage attackers can do in the unlikely event that they are able to successfully compromise a service. As a result, the risk of attackers making permanent changes to the Windows Vista client or attacking other computers on the network is reduced.
Administrators can use Network Access Protection to prevent clients that do not meet the internal system health policy from connecting to the internal network and potentially spreading malware to other machines.
Enterprise users with computers with appropriate enabling hardware benefit from protection of data on lost or stolen computers with BitLocker? Drive Encryption. A computer with BitLocker enabled will have its entire Windows volume encrypted?protecting data, files, e-mail, and intellectual property from unauthorized users trying to break into a computer.
Finally, to ensure that IT departments have a wide variety of authentication mechanisms to choose from, Windows Vista includes new authentication architecture that is easier for third-party developers to extend. Ultimately, this will lead to a wider choice of smart cards, fingerprint scanners, and other forms of strong authentication. Together, these security improvements will make users more confident in using their PCs.
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