Module we're about to begin is entitled general security principals
in this part of the seminar.
We will discuss the so-called 10 immutable laws of security created in 2000 by Scott Kulp from the Microsoft
Security Response Center.
We will look into the principles or laws which you see in the slide above.
One by one we'll also try to determine whether principles created 12 years ago are still valid.
When they were published they sparked a heated discussion in the I.T. security circles.
The principals were praised by some for their universal message.
However many thought that these rules were an attempt to shift responsibility for bugs in the Microsoft
Windows software from the company to the users and administrators.
The first law states if a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer it's not solely
your computer anymore.
Please remember that these laws were created in 2000 when Windows 98 was the most widely used system
and millenium and enty versions were rarely chosen.
The bugs of previous versions of the system were fixed in Windows 2000 with Windows 95 and 98 were simply
unsecure nable nor were they stable any program you ran on these systems took control over.
If the program is faulty unhappen the crash.
The whole system crashed with it neither the system gave you the possibility to preempt the strike.
There were no access control lists no user privileges.
That's why the first law is particularly important for Microsoft.
It turns out that this principle is still valid.
In modern operating systems there are few security boundaries that is mechanisms which limit and restrict
programs operations
to this day.
No program or process has such a boundary one process can modify the data used by another process and
a process started by the administrator can even modify the system data.
Even today users don't exercise much control over running programs.
We trust that a program does what we want it to.
This is the main reason why we have to be very cautious when starting programs from unreliable sources
such as the Internet or peer to peer networks surfing the Internet.
You have to be cautious with even well-known and potentially safe Web sites.
Please note that we usually download programs for the HTP protocol.
This means that it's possible to modify the data during the transmission for instance the way the program
works can be changed.
The program can work appropriately in the web browser but the copy you download may be infected with
a trojan which will start when you launch the program.
Such types of attacks are well known and well documented.
It's very hard to protect your computer against them.
Administrators may introduce measures that would allow users to start only trusted programs
in the right hand side of the slide you can see the Internet Explorer running in the safe mode.
This means it's running in it's own virtual environment this protects the operating system from possible
modifications that could be introduced without the user's knowledge the solution will only protect you
against Internet threats such as I-frame cookies.
It won't stop you however from opening a file that you downloaded from the Internet.
The first law is still valid.
The consequences of an attack can be limited if you run the programs on an account with administrator
privileges.
In particular you shouldn't do that when it comes to programs that communicate with untrusted computers.