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It’s not 2001 anymore. You can have both secure windows and Linux infrastructure. Telling people to just use Linux as a remedy doesn’t help. If you don’t inves

It’s not 2001 anymore. You can have both secure windows and Linux infrastructure. Telling people to just use Linux as a remedy doesn’t help. If you don’t invest into securing your Windows infra, your Linux infra will be also full of holes.

breck 5y ago
In 2016, while I was still working at Microsoft, they gave us cloud engineers a separate laptop for accessing customer data (they called them SAWS, for Secure Access Workstation), because they decided that our normal everyday Windows 10 machines with root privileges could not be trusted. This was in 2016, not 2001. I do not think you can have secure Windows infrastructure today. In the future, a few years after it's fully open source, perhaps. Of course you are free to make your own bets.
- justapassenger 5y ago
  This sounds more like a policy decision. Any serious company is heavily limiting how customer data is accessed. Lots of them have special rooms, with heavy physical security, where you cannot even bring electronic watch, not even talking about your work phone or normal work laptop. And those companies often run on Linux. Open source doesn’t make stuff magically secure. Remember heartbleed? Or how easy it’s was proven (by sketchy research, sure, but that’s secondary point) to bring malicious code into THE open source project, Linux kernel? Believing that by simply using open source you have secure infra, and that by using Windows is naive view by people who never seriously worked on security for big companies. I say all of that as a heavy Linux supporter. Linux is better, yes. But it’s not a magic bullet. I’ve worked in Windows shops that had extremely good security, and Linux shops that could’ve been hacked by someone after one day classes of how to be a hacker.
  - breck 5y ago
    Agreed that open source isn't perfect, but 99.999% secure is still a lot better than 99.9% secure.

breck 5y ago

In 2016, while I was still working at Microsoft, they gave us cloud engineers a separate laptop for accessing customer data (they called them SAWS, for Secure Access Workstation), because they decided that our normal everyday Windows 10 machines with root privileges could not be trusted. This was in 2016, not 2001. I do not think you can have secure Windows infrastructure today. In the future, a few years after it's fully open source, perhaps. Of course you are free to make your own bets.

justapassenger 5y ago
This sounds more like a policy decision. Any serious company is heavily limiting how customer data is accessed. Lots of them have special rooms, with heavy physical security, where you cannot even bring electronic watch, not even talking about your work phone or normal work laptop. And those companies often run on Linux. Open source doesn’t make stuff magically secure. Remember heartbleed? Or how easy it’s was proven (by sketchy research, sure, but that’s secondary point) to bring malicious code into THE open source project, Linux kernel? Believing that by simply using open source you have secure infra, and that by using Windows is naive view by people who never seriously worked on security for big companies. I say all of that as a heavy Linux supporter. Linux is better, yes. But it’s not a magic bullet. I’ve worked in Windows shops that had extremely good security, and Linux shops that could’ve been hacked by someone after one day classes of how to be a hacker.
- breck 5y ago
  Agreed that open source isn't perfect, but 99.999% secure is still a lot better than 99.9% secure.