How Windows Vista Protect Mobile PCs
Using a mobile computer inside corporate office is very much secure as compare to using it outside the corporate network. In corporate network your mobile computer id protected with corporate firewall, anti-virus, spyware’s, corporate access control and other security polices but what about using mobile PCs outside the boundaries of corporate office. Many organizations using laptops for flexible work hours. Regardless the flexibility introduced by laptops in working hours also introduces more security risks and more unknown challenges. Once an employee takes their laptop and leaves, they are on their own. The laptop becomes an island unto itself and must be able to defend itself against malware, unauthorized access, and other malicious activities.
Microsoft’s latest operating system windows vista provides more secure foundation for laptops as compare to earlier versions of windows operating system. Let’s take a look at some of the components that go into Windows Vista’s security, and why Windows Vista should be the operating system of choice when securing your mobile computer is a priority.
Address Space Layout Randomization: Address space layout randomization (ASLR) is a computer security technique which involves randomly arranging the positions of key data areas, usually including the base of the executable and position of libraries, heap, and stack, in a process’s address space. Prior to windows vista memory addresses were static and could be discovered. Static memory addresses can be easily discovered by an attacker who is developing a malware or trying to do malicious activities on memory.
Data Execution Prevention: Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a security feature Included in Windows Vista , that prevents any application or service to execute code from a non-executable memory location. These types of attacks mainly targets computer programs that are poorly written. Prevention from Data Execution Prevention is first introduced in windows XP sp2.
Windows Vista Firewall: Firewall is a critical first line of defense to protect your computer against many types of malicious software. Vista firewall monitors and restricts both incoming and outgoing traffic. Vista firewall also provides internet protocol security settings and Firewall filtering settings integrated. Monitoring outgoing traffic gives a fair idea which computer programs are trying to access the internet and whether are these programs also trying to send some important data to remote systems.
Internet Explorer with protected mode: Internet explorer running in protected mode provides an extra level of security and data protection to windows vista users. Protected Mode protects the system by ensuring that any malware or exploits encountered via the Web are unable to affect the operating system or core functionality. In Protected Mode, Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista cannot modify user or system files and settings without user consent. Protected Mode requires the user to confirm any activity that tries to put something on your machine or start another program.
BitLocker Drive Encryption: BitLocker Drive Encryption is a data protection feature available in Windows Vista Enterprise and Ultimate for client computers and in Windows Server 2008. BitLocker enhances data protection drive encryption and the integrity checking of early boot components. Drive encryption protects data by preventing unauthorized users from breaking Windows file and system protection on lost, stolen or inappropriately decommissioned computers. This protection is achieved by encrypting the entire Windows volume; with BitLocker all user and system files are encrypted including the swap and hibernation files. Integrity checking the early boot components helps to ensure that data decryption is performed only if those components appear unmolested and that the encrypted drive is located in the original computer.
This post is created while reading some articles on Microsoft Windows Vista website, Microsoft Technet Windows Website and definitions are taken from Wikipedia.
May 16, 2008 Symantec released it’s two new Norton security products for public beta. 
Microsoft 
Ratproxy is a semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool. It is meant to complement active crawlers and manual proxies more commonly used for this task, and is optimized specifically for an accurate and sensitive detection, and automatic annotation, of potential problems and security-relevant design patterns based on the observation of existing, user-initiated traffic in complex web 2.0 environments. The approach taken with ratproxy offers several important advantages over more traditional methods:
Gmail team seems to be working very hard to make their E-Mail service more secure. Recently Gmail team has introduced two new security features in Gmail. Gmail developers introduced Remote Sign out and Better support for Phishing messages.
Spammers are now using Amazon’s Clod service EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud). Over last couple of days 
Today on Tuesday July 1, 2008 Passpack has released the desktop version of it’s online password manager software. Passpack Desktop is based on Adobe AIR. Desktop version of Passpack is best suited to use as a backup of all your online passwords. This new release automatically synchronize to Passpack online.
I think, Spammers and Phishers are always come with some new idea and targets to spread spam messages. This time they are targeting 
Spammers are now targeting Smartphone’s like Blackberry and iPhone. Spammers are seeing these new Smartphone as a new market to spread spam messages. By the end of 2010 there will be around 1.3 Billion computers and 4 Billion Smartphone’s so it makes real sense to target these hand handled devices. Spammers mostly use text messages to spread spam using Smartphone’s. Using Smartphone’s to spread spam messages is much costlier then sending E-Mails.
