ActiveX poses threat to Vista, Microsoft says

By Gregg Keizer

November 10, 2008 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista operating system is far better protected from attack code than Windows XP is. However, in a report issued last week, the company said that its own ActiveX plug-in technology is a significant threat to Vista.

The latest of the company's twice-yearly security intelligence reports said that half of the top 10 browser-based attacks against Windows XP over the past six months exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft's own software.

None of the top 10 attacks against Vista systems did so, the report said. Instead, most of those attacks targeted bugs in third-party Internet Explorer add-ins created using ActiveX controls.

George Stathakopoulos, general manager of Microsoft's product security and security engineering group, said the results show that the company has improved new-product security.

"Our security development processes do pay off," he said, though he acknowledged that "ecosystemwide, we still have a problem."

This version of this article originally appeared in Computerworld's print edition.

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