Wired: Locking Windows’ Backdoors

“We’ve got some serious problems here, folks. We’ve got some
really bad backdoors on the computers we have on our
desktops,” said Richard Smith, president of Cambridge,
Massachusetts-based Phar Lap Software, who identified the person
accused of writing the Melissa virus.”

“During his presentation at the 8th Usenix Security Symposium,
Smith demonstrated some new security flaws he and his collaborators
have identified in their spare time. One recently unearthed and
not-yet-fixed Win98 glitch lets an email opened in Outlook execute
any DOS command — including reformatting your hard drive or
uploading its contents to a remote Web site.”

“The solution? Consumers could switch to a non-Microsoft
operating system. Another option, Smith suggested, is for customers
to begin asking computer companies to turn off features that let
email messages execute other programs…”

“Many of the problems security experts have identified stem from
the design choices Microsoft made when developing Windows 95 and
98, which are much more vulnerable to intrusions than Linux, Unix,
or even Macintosh systems.”

Complete
Story