Microsoft maintains the announcement that Vista is the most secure version of Windows it has ever released. According to the company the security of Vista is superior to that of XP. This is partially owed to the introduction of User Account Control (UAC), intended to prevent users logged in without administrator rights continuously encountering restrictions.
When administrator rights are solicited, Windows will perform a extra checking back with the user. The purpose of this is the prevention of malware from sneaking into the system.
Implementing UAC, says Microsoft, has helped them to categorize 12 of the 23 security updates for Vista released in the last year as having slight importance for the reason that, if a break-in occurred, malicious code would not have had success in running with admin rights. Following a research, Microsoft reports a 60 % decrease in malware infections compared with XP.
Furthermore, Internet Explorer 7's Protected mode has reportedly done a great job preventing even more security problems. As the company declares, the phishing filter, is currently blocking over a million phishing attacks per week on browser users.
Another aspect that tends to prove that Vista is more secure and that Microsoft's introduction of the Security Development Lifecycle is an inspired and effective move, is the number of patches. Accordingly, there were only fourteen updates to stop serious fissures in Vista in the last year, while XP SP2 had 23. Moreover, Vista revealed only 36 vulnerabilities in any case – comparing to XP SP2's 68.
Even with the so much advertised security improvements, Vista fails to become as popular as Microsoft intended. It seems that the culprit might be high hardware requirements. Security specialist Thomas Dullien declared that Vista indeed passed the tests as the toughest mainstream operating system to crack that he had so far encountered.
