I have a lot of experience with software as a developer, and am trying to move f

Question

I have a lot of experience with software as a developer, and am trying to move from newbie to more informed about present-day security. Everything I uncover makes me feel that personal computers have become horribly horribly insecure, while most consumers (like me) have grown complacent because the old days of constant system crashes, pop-ups, destructive malware, etc. have seemingly gone away. My system never crashes, ever. I never see pop-ups. I block annoying spam and ads. I have never seen a virus scanner find anything (Mac past 3 years; Linux for several years before that; Windows at work managed by IT team).

I am not implying these things represent rock-solid security, just saying, they have made most people believe their systems are more secure when in fact, they seem less secure than they've ever been, with more dangerous threats. Am I wrong in this assessment?

Explanation / Answer

I would argue that computers are more secure today than they were in the past for one simple reason known attacks have had operating systems patched against them.

I had a professor tell me once that it was easy to overwrite DOS system memory and it wasn't uncommon for games to overwrite it just so they would have that memory then put it back when they were done. Modern operating systems make overwriting system memory quite a bit harder.

I would also note that with Windows Vista Microsoft moved their development model to one that was security oriented. This included things like: User account control, improvements to the firewall, the inclusion of Windows Defender, ASLR (loads system files to random memory locations to prevent attacks), obfuscating function pointers, intrinsic stack-overflow detection, DEP (in XP SP2 too), application isolation, windows service hardening,

Windows 7 has the security center and Microsoft Security Essentials (as well as the Vista enhancements).

Windows 8 has Secure boot (uses hardware to block rootkits), ELAM, Windows Defender now scans network traffic too for suspicious activity, and AppContainer(Sandbox).

I don't know too much about Macs, but I do know that Apple added some security features. You may find this interesting too.

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