My original comment specified a roughly 10-year period, from about '02-'12. Most of the malware then was not state sponsored. And I'm not blaming MS for having a few vulnerabilities. But literally hundreds, perhaps more. Patch Tuesday ? Really ? Their product was so bad they had to dedicate a day of each calendar month to addressing vulnerabilities.
But what's worse, was the response. They had time to patch all these holes, but not to write code that fixed users' systems from the damage that the exploits did. Or to address the underlying vulnerable model that lets these exploits happen. They just played "poke-a-hole/plug-a-hole" for most of a decade. Someone brought up Windows Defender, wasn't released till October 06, and it didnt' work. Everytime I removed spyware from someones machine I used free tools such as MBAM made by third parties who weren't even being paid by MS! Even with all these vulnerabilities, it would have been better if System Restore actually did just that. They should have architected a system that, in the worst case, could restore you back, _including virus removal_. Thats how you take responsibility in that situation.
Instead, they used the situation to further profit, by releasing more versions of windows. Thats a weaker version of racketeering: "oh, version XP has major security bugs...better pay us to upgrade to Vista!... then to 7...then to 8".
If this were any non-software product, there would have been massive class action lawsuits and recalls. And that would send a message to the whole community that you can't harm people and leave them high and dry
My original comment specified a roughly 10-year period, from about '02-'12. Most of the malware then was not state sponsored. And I'm not blaming MS for having a few vulnerabilities. But literally hundreds, perhaps more. Patch Tuesday ? Really ? Their product was so bad they had to dedicate a day of each calendar month to addressing vulnerabilities.
But what's worse, was the response. They had time to patch all these holes, but not to write code that fixed users' systems from the damage that the exploits did. Or to address the underlying vulnerable model that lets these exploits happen. They just played "poke-a-hole/plug-a-hole" for most of a decade. Someone brought up Windows Defender, wasn't released till October 06, and it didnt' work. Everytime I removed spyware from someones machine I used free tools such as MBAM made by third parties who weren't even being paid by MS! Even with all these vulnerabilities, it would have been better if System Restore actually did just that. They should have architected a system that, in the worst case, could restore you back, _including virus removal_. Thats how you take responsibility in that situation.
Instead, they used the situation to further profit, by releasing more versions of windows. Thats a weaker version of racketeering: "oh, version XP has major security bugs...better pay us to upgrade to Vista!... then to 7...then to 8".
If this were any non-software product, there would have been massive class action lawsuits and recalls. And that would send a message to the whole community that you can't harm people and leave them high and dry