Windows 7 – [New?] Security Features

I’ve been playing with Windows 7 Beta since its official release. As most have expected, it really is much like the current Vista. But I’ve noticed enough tweaks to be inspired. It can really be looked at as like the jump from Win98 to Win98 2nd Ed. It definitely improves over Vista, and so far, every way is better (at least to me). There are quite a few GUI and UI changes, but I’m not going to get into those. What I’ve focused on so far is tracking down any and all security related items that seemed to irk me in Vista.

One of the first things I checked out was UAC. They changed it slightly but mostly just to ease the pains of some people’s annoyances with it (I was one of them). The underlying intentions are still there. They even go so far as to claim that even if you disable all notifications, it is still working in the background. So for this, I can see many support calls on why something didn’t happen when a user tried something (because you were never notified of the pending actions needed). My actual experience with the UAC is pretty much still unchanged, I went with the setting just below default, and still got numerous prompts and displays when trying to install something.

Another area I wanted to explore was the default settings on the firewall. One area which I always assumed should be defaulted was blocking outbound connections. This was a feature added in Vista but was not default. I’m guessing 75% of people never even knew it was a feature. I was hoping MS would get their act together and enable this by default. But I guess like the previous UAC, this would have caused too many nagging issues for the user. One more thing I’ve read about but haven’t had a chance to look into deeper is that MS has opened the doors to the built-in firewall and are going to allow 3rd party vendors the ability to integrate with the firewall. But with this also comes the ability to enable/disable parts of the firewall as needed. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. The first thing that comes to my paranoid mind is malicious software exploiting this to simply turn off your firewall, or open a port for its own use. I’m not exactly sure how this “feature” is going to work, but I think this will be my next deep dive.

Gone are the ways of the “Security Center” – in its place we get the “Action Center.” I really wasn’t impressed by what it had to offer. It is an improvement, but basically it just combined a handful of otherwise tedious to manage items into a single one-stop-shop for management (Items included: Security Center; Problem, Reports, and Solutions; Windows Defender; Windows Update; Diagnostics; Network Access Protection; Backup and Restore; Recovery; and User Account Control).

One of the other areas that was extended was with the BitLocker Drive Encryption. It has been extended to support external media now. I’m still a fan of TrueCrypt, but I like that MS is trying.

So, overall, I think MS is definitely going in the right direction. This is still beta software, so I’m sure some things will change before final release. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even find some of these enhancements in a Vista SP2.