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Intentional windows backdoor?


Fr33m4n

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Personally, I tend to discount anything Gibson says by about 99%. He is well known for 'mountains out of molehills', is an incurable attention-whore, and has several times 'discovered' so called major problems in windows. His crusade to try to get microsoft to remove raw sockets from XP is legendary, though his promised 'internet armageddon' has so far failed to materialise.

Bottom line, he is first and last a journalist who happens to have computing skills. In the online world it seems people either bless the ground that his shadow falls on, or curse his name and family to the n'th generation. Never really seen anyone with a neutral opinion of him. Many of his tools are, as stated, very simplistic, and often downright dangerous (spinrite has probably destroyed more systems when used by novices than it has saved). His port scanner is very simplistic (though if you believe the hype it's the only thing that is saving the world from 12 year old kids with a port scanner). In fact, there are people out there who believe they are bullet-proof after visiting his site, and in fact they are still vulnerable.

He is however a reasonably good asm programmer, I have learned a bit from disecting his tools.

Bah, I could go on all day about this, so I'll just say - seach out his name on google and you'll get an idea of his real agenda ;)

bottom line - I dont believe there is an intentional backdoor in windows, just shoddy programming.

Regarding backdoors in encryption, the current popular encryption methods are well documented and open source, and have been proven over time to contain no backdoors. Remember the original author of PGP was sent to jail by the US govt for his encryption code and principles (his system was stronger than the gvt approved publicly avaliable cyphers)

my 2p

SP

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@suryad

far fetched? no, i don't think so. i disagree with your Linux statement however - the source code is there for everyone to see. not to say it hasn't been done in FOSS before (because it has according to what i've read), but code like that doesn't last long. someone is going to catch it.

Yeah didnt think about Linux being FOSS :lol: Cant believe I missed that!

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Looks like Steve Gibson's ploy worked - lots of attention for him and lots of hits for his site.

To the security community he is considered a joke, and his website reads like a gaudy flyer for a low-class burger joint, stuffed with pseudo-technical jargon, fantastical tin-foil hat claims and portents of doom (still yet to materialize).

The US government does not have worldwide jurisdiction and Microsoft would not be so short-sighted as to deliberately put in a "backdoor" which could be exploited by just anyone - "reasonable conclusion" is not the description I would use.

Not a very good "backdoor" either as it requires user interaction.

Steve's use of CAPITAL LETTERS in his text in a bid to reinforce his POINT is also very IRRITATING.

He has zero credibility in my book, unless I'm after a good laugh.

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It's a feature not a bug, just like Word macros and the like.

Microsoft probably intended to allow embedded code in WMF files.

I have a rather strong dislike of Gibson. He overexaggerates severely and seems to know very little.

His crusade to try to get microsoft to remove raw sockets from XP is legendary, though his promised 'internet armageddon' has so far failed to materialise.
I had a good laugh about that...
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