Windows 95 is a popular OS, but users don't rate it as highly as other OSes when it comes to security. According to a recent survey performed by BYTE Research, users ranked Win 95 as the OS or application with the highest security risk.
Due to the security holes in Win 95, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer that have been documented and publicized over the past couple of years, it's not surprising that those products were rated as high security threats. What is somewhat surprising is that Win 98 -- the next version of Windows -- was also deemed a relatively high security risk. Win 98 will have new features, such as security zones, that let IS managers or users set different default security policies for different classes of sites (e.g., intranet, trusted Web sites, Internet, and restricted Web sites). But respondents are either unimpressed with or uninformed about those features. Unix was deemed as the lowest security threat, although NT 5.0 was a very close second.
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