Microsoft a decade ahead of Apple on security, We’re not so sure

In a recent interview, Kaspersky Lab founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky claimed that Apple is “10 years” behind Microsoft on security, as evidenced by the recent malware attacks affecting Mac OS X

There’s been a lot of chatter lately that the recent Flashback and Flashfake malware infestations plaguing Apple’s Max OS X are a sign that the Mac is not nearly as secure as Apple and its devout fans would like you to believe.

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Eugene Kaspersky, however, founder and CEO of Kaspersky Lab—a leading producer of security software—claims things are much worse. He says that Apple is in a potentially dire position and must change its approach to patches and updates, much in the same way Microsoft did year ago to more quickly and efficiently address vulnerabilities in Windows.

In a recent interview with CBR Online, Kaspersky said,

“I think they are ten years behind Microsoft in terms of security. For many years I've been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows. It's always been possible to develop Mac malware, but this one was a bit different. For example it was asking questions about being installed on the system and, using vulnerabilities, it was able to get to the user mode without any alarms."

Of course it’s possible to develop malware for OSX. Malware could be developed for any OS. As far as malware exploiting vulnerabilities, is that what’s been happening on Windows systems for ages?

Before we go on, we should point out what we believe to be a serious flaw in that statement. When Kaspersky says “there is no big difference between Mac and Windows,” that may be true on some level because they are both consumer operating systems, but the underlying technologies in OS X and Windows are fundamentally different. OS X is based on UNIX, which is decades more mature than Windows. And with that maturity also comes strong security.

Kaspersky goes on to say, "They will understand very soon that they have the same problems Microsoft had ten or 12 years ago. They will have to make changes in terms of the cycle of updates and so on and will be forced to invest more into their security audits for the software."

This may or may not be the case. Kaspersky asserts that the success of Flashback / Flashfake will result in more malware being released for OS X. We’re not so sure. Most malware producers are in it to make a quick buck, not for notoriety. And the success of one piece of malware, doesn’t guarantee more will follow. Flashback / Flashfake may be getting some attention now, but targeting the Mac just doesn’t make as much financial sense as targeting Windows.

The fact of the matter is, even with relatively strong Mac sales, Windows-based systems far outsell the Mac and malware producers are always going to more aggressively target the largest install base. At least that’s our opinion. What say you?

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Three Ways To Be Productive Using SharePoint and SQL Server (Part 1)

Introduction
In the first part of my three-part series on increasing productivity when using SharePoint and SQL Server, we will focus on searching product data from the Adventure Works database, including the use of meta-data and managed properties. The second part will show how to link the search results to a page highlighting some of the Business Intelligence (BI) features of SharePoint based on product data. The third will focus on maintaining expertise in MySites in a managed fashion.

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Searching Product Data from the Adventure Works Database
One of the great benefits of using SharePoint is that it provides search, business intelligence, collaboration and portals on a unified platform. This provides a huge benefit in terms of cost-savings and productivity. To take advantage of the search functionality and provide the capability to search products in an intranet or public-facing website, it can be done by defining the taxonomy, putting that taxonomy into SharePoint and tying it to a crawl of the products database.

The products in the Adventure Works database are broken down into categories and sub-categories. Go into your Managed Metadata Service and define an Adventure Works Group.

Then, create a term set for both the categories and sub-categories. Now, add the items from the database. These can also be imported using the term store import functionality.

The next step is to create a view in the database that joins the products, sub-categories and categories to be indexed.

In order to connect to the data, go into your secure store application and create a target application to connect to the database. Name the target application “Adventure Works”. Use a Target Application Type of Group. Set the user name and password for Windows. Then, map the Members group to an AD Group that should have access to connect to those credentials.

Now open SharePoint Designer 2010 and connect to your site to create an External Content Type.

Click on External Content Types and choose the option to create a new one.

Enter the name of the content type. In this case, we will name it Adventure Works Products.

Choose Generic List as the Office Item List Type.

Hit the link named “Click Here to Discover External Data Sources and Define Operations” and choose SQL Server.

Enter the database server and database name and choose Connect with Impersonated Custom Identity. Enter the name of the desired secure store application used to connect to the AdventureWorks database.

Create “Read Item” and “Read List” operations for the view we created to expose the products, sub-categories and categories for searching by right-clicking the view name and choosing the new option for each. Accept all defaults on both.

Choose “Create Lists and Form” and name the list “Adventure Works Products”. Now, browse the list to ensure it pulls the products from the database.

Next, go into the Search Service Application to create a crawl of the external content type.

In central administration, open the search service application you wish to use.

Click on Content Sources, then choose New Content Source.

Once the full crawl completes, the next step is to map the Metadata Properties. Click the link to Metadata Properties under Queries and Results in the Search Service Application. Also, ensure the service account used to crawl the products has access to the Adventure Works BCS service application.

Click "Categories", then "Business Data".

At this point, there will be a list of properties from the products view.

Click the ProductCategory property and map it to the ProductCategory Managed property. Do the same for ProductSubCategory.

Run the full crawl again on the Adventure Works content source in the search service application.

Next, setup the action to view the product once it is returned by the search. Go to your business data connectivity service for Adventure Works Products, open it, and click the "View Profile" action and set it as follows:

Now we are set on the search of the products. Go to a search center or create one in your SharePoint environment. Add refinement filters to include the product and product subcategories.

Edit the search web page and modify the Refinement Panel web part.

Expand the Refinement grouping in the web part and de-select the Use Default Configuration option.

Add two tags to the XML in the Filter Category Definition property:






Search for Accessories and view the results. You can now search for products by product information, category and sub-category. Hover over the link to the product results and view the URL.

In the second part of the article series, we will create a product page with some BI features. .

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