Trusting the Trustworthy

It’s been over two years since Microsoft announced plans to make their products secure. Since then continuous stream of new and increasingly vicious viruses and worms have crawled their way into our computers and the trend doesn’t appear to be stopping (or even diminishing) any time soon.

Okay, so we knew all that talk about security was a lot of hot air and convoluted products such as Windows and Office can never truly be trustworthy. And we keep downloading new definitions for our gallant software defenders of viruses, spywares, and worms, in the hopes to shield ourselves from these mischiefs before they get a piece of us. It’s an incessant act of arm-wrestling with the clever hackers. Sometimes we win and other times we end up with a big “L” on our foreheads.

Having to juggle so many high-tech tools to protect myself from these miscreants has really started to tire me. So one day when I was checking the running tasks on my PC in the never-ending quest to find aliens, I realized that most of the tasks already look like aliens. Have you checked them out recently? (if you have Windows 2000 or XP press Ctrl-Shift-Esc and click on Processes). I mean what the hell are lsass or wisptis? Or for that matter crss or smss?

So how about it Microsoft? How about giving us a simple tool to understand what’s going on in our PC’s and what all these running tasks are? And while you are at it make the extra effort and give us a list of the bad (or at least mysterious) actors and verify that the good are authentic, not evil imposters.