Virus And Spyware Removal

Google

Google is dropping Windows. The search giant will use Mac or Linux operating systems on all employee computers because of security concerns about Microsoft’s Windows.

The Financial Times, quoting several unnamed Google employees, reported the story on Tuesday. It said the move away from Windows began in January after the search giant was attacked by hackers in China. Most Google employees are choosing Mac, one source told the Times. Google hasn’t commented on the report.

‘Something’s Not Right’

Microsoft’s head of corporate communications, Frank X. Shaw, noted in a Twitter post that the Chinese security breaches involved “IE 6 and employee behavior,” not Windows per se. “Something’s not right w/the FT.com Google-dumps-Windows story,” he wrote. Except for Shaw’s tweets, Microsoft hasn’t commented on the report.

If a Google employee wants to remain on Windows, special clearance is reportedly required from senior executives, and getting a new Windows machine requires specific approval from the company’s CIO.

The security breach was reported by Google in mid-January. In a post on the Official Google Blog, Chief Legal Officer David Drummond revealed that, in “mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.”

The attack, he noted, was not just on Google, but on a “wide range of businesses” involved in the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors. Drummond said “a primary goal was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists,” which was apparently not successful. Reports by independent security consultants indicated that the attackers appear to have been working directly or indirectly on behalf of Chinese government intelligence agencies.

Trojan as a Windows DLL

According to iDefense Labs, an independent security company, the December attack used malicious code delivered via PDF e-mail attachments, which deposited a backdoor Trojan as a Windows DLL.

Like all operating systems, Windows is known to have security vulnerabilities, but the number of attacks and viruses for that OS is much larger than for Mac OS X or Linux. To at least some degree, that is derived from the fact that, as the most popular OS, Windows is a much larger target. Windows is used by more than 80 percent of computers worldwide.

Eventually, Google may want to move more employees to either or both of its own operating systems, Android and Chrome. Android has become popular for smartphones, and is rapidly appearing on netbooks and tablets. The browser-based Chrome OS, which Google said will be released before the end of this year, creates a new, cloud-based model for personal computing.

Google has become Microsoft’s biggest competitor on a variety of fronts, including search, tablet computer and smartphone OSes, web-based e-mail, cloud-based productivity tools, and other areas, but the anti-Windows decision doesn’t appear to have been driven by that competition.