SECURITY REPORTS

"Stay away from Windows 2000"

Barbara Gengler

A t a Gartner Group US conference on NT in the Enterprise held in early May, its head of

research warned enterprise users to stay away from the early release of Windows 2000. He said there would be far too many bugs for businesses to deal with, especially if Microsoft rushes the release to October of this year.

"This is going to be the killer on the first release", said the Gartner Group's director of research, Tom Bittman. "The beta program is only going to catch the easy ones." He predicted that although Windows 2000 will have its benefits, it will not be as reliable as NT 4.0 is now. "Microsoft will catch up only in following releases", Bittman said.

Bittman also pointed out that when Microsof t executives call Windows 2000 "reliable", potential users should take that in comparison to NT 4.0 and the Windows 9x consumer line, not operating systems such as Unix, Linux or AS/400. He added that the skills costs associated with a major project such as deploying Windows 2000 could be daunting and that NT-skilled professionals have been seeking raises of some 25% since early 1998.

The Gartner Group has been telling its customers, for quite some time, not to expect Windows 2000 to ship until the first half of 2000. Bittman said Microsoft might indeed meet a release date of October 6 but it would be only for "bragging rights", because Beta 3 testing just began and you need to be lengthy for such a major product.

'Yes, l know there's an October 6 date. There was also a 1995 date", Bittman said.

Although Bittman said Windows 2000 would never be "the end-all and be-all", he predicted that in the next few years, it would be an important part of most enterprise architectures. He said that the number of applications written for NT will outpace those for Unix when Windows 2000 is out next year, and said Windows 2000 will go a long way toward addressing NT's scalability problems.

Still, enterprises will adapt Windows 2000 early at

"Wait for at least the first Windows 2000 service pack"

their peril, he said. Users should wait for at least the first Windows 2000 service pack, or possibly the f irs t w h o l e - s c a l e upgrade , b e f o r e de- p loy ing it wide ly , he added.

At just about the same time as the conference, M i c r o s o f t r e l eased Beta 3 of W i ndows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Advanced Server, which the company said will go to more than 650 000 customers, developers and channel partners. Vice president Brian Valentine called it "the first big milestone. The team is feeling really good about the release." Now, Microsoft plans to release candidates every five to eight weeks, Valentine said. However, they will not be traditional release candidates that lead up to the final product. Instead, they will be more like the "interim builds" that beta testers receive, even though they will be called release candidates.

He also said Windows 2000 will ship this year, "unless feedback on the final beta dictates otherwise."

The Yorkshire Posse Barbara Gengler

A number of high profile sites were hacked over one weekend in April by a group of hackers

supposed ly based in Canada but cal led the Yorkshire Posse.

The group said 13 companies were targeted to protest the arrest last April of Canadian Jason Mewhiney, who is suspected of breaking into a NASA Web site and causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage.

Information technology publisher, O 'Re i l ly & Associates in California, one of the sites that was hit, said they believe they were targeted because they are a high-profile site. Sara Winge, a spokeswoman for O'Reilly, explained "they were trying to get a message

Computer Fraud & Security June 1999 3723/99/$20.00 © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved