A flaw that has been present in Microsoft software since 1993, and still affects Windows 7, has been published by a security researcher.
Tavis Ormandy published details of the flaw on the Neohapsis mailing list on Tuesday.
The problem lies in the Virtual DOS Machine, Heise security explained on Wednesday.
"Microsoft isn't having an easy time of it these days," said the Heise article. "In addition to the unpatched hole in Internet Explorer, a now published hole in Windows allows users with restricted access to escalate their privileges to system level – and this is believed to be possible on all 32-bit versions of Windows from Windows NT 3.1 up to, and including Windows 7."
Workarounds include users disabling the MS-DOS subsystem by starting the group policy editor and enabling the "Prevent access to 16-bit applications" option in a sub-menu of the computer configuration tab, according to the Heise article.
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This just proves that closed source and proprietary software like Windows and just about every other Microsoft product is prone to these types of problems. Open source software and Linux is developed by the community and can therefore be fixed by the community as well.
But the million dollar question is when a flow is identified how long will it take for the community to fix? Faster than MS? will the fix be reliable?
@hanserian, anyone using Linux can tell you that a flaw is normally fixed in hours, not days, months, or years, like MS products. Reliability again beats MS. How many times has a patch, on windows, had to be re-done because it broke other things. MS has a dismal record on fixing flaws, and the reliability of the patches.