Windows 8 security: Protection at the deepest level
If every computer had antivirus software running, life would be tough for bot herders and cyber-crooks. Their ability to orchestrate spam campaigns and denial of service attacks relies on a plentiful supply of unprotected computers. The good news is that Windows 8 will put the squeeze on those creeps. It has antivirus protection built right in, enabled by default if no other antivirus program is present. But its new security features at the very deepest level may be even more significant. To understand what Windows 8 adds, we need to look back at the evolution of operating system security.
The story so far…
COM file programs for the original MS-DOS were laughably insecure by modern standards. DOS simply copied the program byte for byte from disk into memory and started it running. It made no distinction between code and data, so a buffer overrun attack could easily force execution of arbitrary code. Early file-infector viruses simply appended their own code to the end of the program, and replaced the very first instruction with a jump to that code.
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