Who would have thought that Microsoft would be in a position of snubbing Linux for 'security' reasons? It seems very possible that Redmond would like to have vast swathes of Microsoft and Cisco networking disable all Linux traffic and connectivity by default.. . .
Who would have thought that Microsoft would be in a position of snubbing Linux for 'security' reasons? It seems very possible that Redmond would like to have vast swathes of Microsoft and Cisco networking disable all Linux traffic and connectivity by default.

Of course, this is not explicitly stated in this article about vendor-based security cooperation. However, the agreement to only allow 'safe' traffic though only involves five companies: Microsoft, Cisco, Symantec, Computer Associates, and Trend Micro. Of these, only Trend Micro has any Linux security offering at all; Symantec and CA have been recently panned by SecurityPipeline.com as being the only major AVSes out there that did not support Linux.

Given Linux's growing market share, its easy to speculate that this might actually be stipulated in some agreement between these AVSes and Redmond. Even for Trend, Linux looks like an afterthought-offering, which certainly has not taken the Linux world by storm. Microsoft and Cisco, of course, both see Linux as a possible threat.

Interestingly, the article does mention Linux. Specifically, it details the fantastic job the Debian team did in dealing with the recent attack against them via the now-infamous do_brk() kernel vunerability. However, this does not appear to lead anyone to think that there should be a voice representing some sort of Linux standard in the mix. Even the reference to the need to include all of the "networking vendors", stated by a third party, falls short of specifying the need to include other operating systems. That looks more like saying that Linksys must be involved.

However, if Linux is not invited (let alone BSD, Darwin, AmigaOS etc.) then its hard to escape the conclusion that they will no longer be welcome in networks using this agreed security framework. The question is, do we have to worry about this, or will it die due to its own lack of support for heterogeneous networking?

The link for this article located at TechTarget.com is no longer available.