Is Vista Vulnerable To Hacking?

by: Amy Twain

Is it really indeed possible that Windows Vista, Microsoft’s newly released operating system being vulnerable and prone to hacking? Yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen and it is confirmed according to Microsoft itself. Well, it seems that an audio podcast has the capacity of hacking Windows Vista’s feature on speech recognition.

Those nasty hackers can actually run some awful programs by using recorded audio commands. Based on an investigation administered by Microsoft itself, Vista’s speech recognition feature could let a hacker perform some commands verbally on the computer unit of a user. Nevertheless, the commands are only limited to the rights of a particular logged on user.

Any commands on an administrative level would be blocked by the User Account Control. The current launching of the Microsoft Vista is the biggest launch ever in the whole history of Microsoft. It came out 5 years after the introduction of Windows XP. It was the grandest launch ever because of the introduction of both a new Office operating system and Windows.

For the first two years, the firm anticipates to sell an estimated 200 million copies to consumers and businesses all across the universe. Just this early, officials in Microsoft predict that Vista would be accepted by people faster than the other operating system of Windows. Microsoft Vista comes in 4 versions with security tools and cutting-edge interface.

The firm also promised that Vista would benefit game developers and gamers as well apart from regular consumers and clients and businesses. Microsoft assures its clients and consumers that it is continually delving into the issue and would offer more guidance in protecting them. Microsoft also explains that the hacking could be executed when the user has speakers and microphone installed and connected to their computer units with the configured speech recognition feature.

Once they exist, an attacker’s or hacker’s audio file can issue verbal commands via the system’s speakers that can be done by the speech recognition feature. With this weakness or flaw, it is highly possible for any other audio file like a podcast to delete some documents of a Vista user and empty the trash.

Users are then suggested or advised to disable speech recognition in Vista. Therefore to prevent this kind of malicious attack, Vista users are strongly advised to take some necessary precautions. First and foremost, turn off those microphone and computer speakers. Then, the next step is to close the Windows Media Player and turn off the speech recognition feature and then restart the unit if the user tries to run an audio file which tries to perform and execute commands on the system.

By going to the speech recognition options and unchecking the “run speech recognition at startup”, the user could then disable speech recognition. Okay, whilst there, the user could disable the default speech profile for the system as well. This is to prevent the damaging risk of outside voices and the noise being identified and recognized as valid for input rather than the voice of the own user.