Security Features Of Microsoft Windows And The Windows Operating System

Microsoft Windows is a graphical operating system that was developed by Microsoft. Microsoft has designed and developed a series of these operating systems since they opened shop. Since Microsoft began developing operating systems they have grown remarkably in terms of usability, graphical interface, speed, and most importantly security. In this paper we are going to take a closer look at the security features that are built in the latest windows operating system which is the Windows 8 operating system. We will also discuss the security services that are provided by the Information Security discipline. Furthermore we will discuss how the Windows 8 features are categorized to the security services provided by the ISO 7498-2. Before we take a look at windows 8 let us go through a short background of the windows operating system from start to date. We will then briefly look at the security features of these earlier versions of operating systems and compare them to the windows 8 security features.
A note to remember is that the security features were gradually improved upon when the internet came to the world of computers.
Windows background
In 1975 two men by the name of Paul Allen and Bill Gates came up with a partnership that dealt with computers, they named this partnership Microsoft (Micrsoft, 2014). Their primary vision was to build a desktop computer for every home.
In the early 1980’s the Microsoft crew announced their first windows operating system and they name it Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) (Micrsoft, 2014). The Disk Operating System was used by personal computers that were built by IBM. MS-DOS had no graphical user interface, the users could only open, navigate, manipulate, and view their files on their person...

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...omponents) o Early Launch Anti-Malware (ELAM) driver o Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) o Remote Attestation
 Phishing Filter
Defender
Defender is an application that is built-in in the windows 8 operating system. In windows 8, defender has been given more capability and is therefore better than the one provided in Windows 7. This application helps protect the computer viruses, worms, and spyware. Basically defender was a basic application that provided good enough protection against common computer threats. Defender is now an application that is refurbished to provide virus detection and removal, what is known as “behavior based protection”, and network intrusion prevention (Symantec, 2014). As we can notice, if we sum up all the components that are included in defender they give us all the major components that are include in a full security package.