NSA features computer security guides


The National Security Agency, at their website, include a number of security guides for operating systems, applications, routers, web servers and browsers, databases, and switches. The guides, especially those focused on the operating systems, are very detailed and include configuration settings that even fairly knowledgeable computer users would not be familiar with.

The settings are also rather on the paranoid side. In Windows XP, this probably necessary, but it does seem excessive in Mac OS X to advise disabling the microphone because sound input is a security risk!
The Windows XP guide is a 143 pages long and contains minute instructions on securing an XP box. The question is, once someone has spent a whole weekend following these very technical instructions, what network related services would still work? Also notable in the instructions is the admission of XP's inferior firewall: "Internet Connection Firewall is not intended or flexible enough to use in a network setting." In other words, it's a piece of crap. Although these issues with the firewall may have been addressed in the latest service pack, one has to wonder how Microsoft could release an operating system in the 21st Century with so weak a firewall? Talk about not taking security seriously.

Posted: Sat - October 30, 2004 at 06:35 PM          

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