How much of these attacks could be avoided by moving away from Microsoft Windows and EXE execution model? What is the cost of going back to thin clients?
I bet the great majority of them.
> "It's actually not that sophisticated," said Christian Beyer of the German company Securepoint. "You open the Word document, the document contains a macro, and the macro downloads the malware from the internet." A macro is a kind of shorthand instruction for the computer.
Why the F does a text processor needs to execute anything at first place when reading a document? this is madness.
And yes, the solution is, on top of every possible IT security practice, and linux everywhere, make enterprise computers dumb terminals with the help of browsers and webtechs. Nothing else should be executed on them. The people who refuse to unlearn MS Office and co, well too bad...
If you're stuck on Windows, make normal.dotm readonly.
> And yes, the solution is, on top of every possible IT security practice, and linux everywhere ..
To keep people stuck on Windows, the Microsoft mantra used to be, our stuff works better with our stuff. Since most OS functionality is moving to the msCloud. Regardless of the OS, you'll be paying the yearly software rent to Microsoft.