Maximum performance in Windows XP, Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003 and compromising security
Microsoft back in the day release a small paper on how to minimize the effect from the antivirus software on the operating system’s performance. Let me point out that the paper was released in July 2007.
But despite the fact of this almost (in computer and internet terms) prehistoric release date TrendLabs’s writer David Sancho still found it relevant to comment on it December 21, 2009. Hole smoke, talk about late timing.
The paper is written about which files you can let your antivirus software not scan in order to increase the performance of your operating system. The decrease of performance is due to file locking. Microsoft recommends that if you are having performance issues cost by the antivirus which is caused by these locked files. It’s a quick and rather dirty fix, which is also what David Sancho wants to point out.
David Sancho got the point when he say the following:
In line with this, we advise users to educate themselves fully about these recommendations before taking any action.
I states that the biggest risk to the consumers computer and internet security is the consumer themselves. As security professionals we need to secure the consumers from themselves because, sadly, they don’t have a clue of what they are doing or what they are agreeing when visiting malicious and non-malicious websites. This of course, is badly generalised but if you as a security concerned programmer wants to create the most secure environment for your user, you’ll have to secure the user from the user itself.
Back to the Microsoft paper. Microsoft as a huge influence on the users should consider more carefully what they are releasing to the public and most of all they should re-read their own papers at least every year in order to make sure that they are giving their users the best kind of advise and in that way contributing to a more secure environment for the normal user.
What do you think of all this? What should Microsoft do to create a more secure envirnorment? Or should the users be more poweruser like?
The Microsoft paper can be found here.
The blog post by David Sancho can be found here.