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As operating systems become more resistant to attack - mostly due to better patc

ID: 3814973 • Letter: A

Question

As operating systems become more resistant to attack - mostly due to better patching of vulnerable code - third-party applications are now responsible for the vast majority of compromises. Thus it should come as no surprise that, according to our 2014 Trustwave Global Security Report, 85 percent of the exploits we detected in 2013 were of third-party plug-ins, including Oracle Java and Adobe Acrobat, Reader and Flash. When it comes to running third-party software - whether it's outsourced, open-source or commercial off-the-shelf - businesses must be on guard. But many are not. Studies have shown that most application code run in enterprise environments come from third parties, but far fewer organizations have controls in place to evaluate the security of these entities and their apps. This dark reality is starting to prompt action from industry groups, such as the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which has proposed new security controls for ensuring third-party software security and resiliency. Ultimately, though, it's up to the organizations that run third-party software to mitigate risk and manage this liability.


Explain What actions should be taken to reduce this risk? Is there a way to make a computer operating system 100% resistant to viruses and attacks? Give examples.

Explanation / Answer

No it is not possible to make a computer operating system 100% resistant to viruses and attacks unless we use our computer with connecting to internet, running applications from third party tools and using insetable media. We cannot guarntee 100 percent security to operating system as user do not only work with the ystem software alone in computer. To enhance the usage we tends to install various application softwares which have better GUI properties. This is where the intruder virus enters in to the system due to various flaws in designing these softwares. By having potential check in systems largely can protect it from viruses but it cannot give aasurance fully. To run the third party tools on our operating systems it has to consume resources relating to memory and ram. The organistions which create these softwares want minimum run time to execute their application. This makes them comprmise at the security level.When we have defined a correct policy and a "good enough" mechanism, we have to implement it on a computer. This can be done statically or dynamically (or both).
Security check at the operating system level can be implemented by us to the third party tools. But it takes good amount of CPU power and memory. Even worse, the finer is the policy formalism, the more complex is the verification mechanism, and hence the more resources it will consume at runtime. All these factors makes our system accesable to threats. Continuous monitoring and enabling safety measures makes our system vulnerable at some level.