Win7 vulnerabilities highlight code auditing requirements
1 min read
A blog report from Sophos that Windows 7 is vulnerable to 80% of viruses, comes as no surprise, says application vulnerability specialist Fortify's European director Richard Kirk.
"Chester Wisniewski's observations that, on a clean machine, Win7 became infected with eight out of the 10 viruses tested sounds bad, but, in our opinion, this is indicative of the sheer volume of code that goes into operating systems today," explains Kirk.
"When you factor in the issue that there are often more than a million lines of code in a typical Windows application, you begin to understand the scale of the problem for software developers," he adds.
According to Kirk, the only piece of good news to come out of the newly-released Microsoft operating system vulnerability reports, is that two of the eight pieces of malware loaded in the tests did not run correctly under Win7.
And he continues: "When you realise that most new machines come bundled with some form of IT security software, it's not such a big deal.
"The volume of code-auditing and checking that is required for a modern operating system and its applications software is a big deal, however – and one that companies using customised or in-house-developed applications should be aware of."
