Steve Gibson says Windows Metafile was a backdoor

So while in the shower today I was listening to Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson's Security now number 22. I almost fell in the shower after hearing the possibility that Microsoft maybe covered up a backdoor in Windows. Simply put Steve Gibson is suggesting that Microsoft or some people involved in the code for the Windows Metafile (WMF) put in a backdoor. Aka it was not a flaw or vunerability, a backdoor! If this is true I'm speechless.

Its easy to think of this as a conspiracy and put on your foil hats now but this deadly serious. Even Steve has admitted if he's wrong he will be the first to admit he's wrong but he really doesnt believe this. He's actually put a lot on the line for this. Personally I think this is just a long line of the mainstream lying to us. Think about it Sony and there badly written DRM and worst still badly written Rootkit. Lies and more damm lies. Even when there pants were down they tried to cover it up by saying people didnt even know what a rootkit was so why tell them. I remember quoting Miles in my post about the Rootkit saying Apple and Microsoft must be pissing themselves with laughter. Well its now Microsoft's time and Apple are not getting away clean. Theres lots of talk about iTunes in the context of useage patterns feedback and the reduction of uses of the sharing feature across the versions. So Apple users don't even laugh because Apple are hardly saints either.

But back to this claim of a backdoor in Windows. If it turns out to be true (and honestly Steve's explaining actually makes a lot of sense I have to say). We have to wonder how many more there are? Who put this backdoor there and who actually knows about it? I expect by the time this gets out there it will make the large news sources quickly. I've not looked on Digg, slashdot, boingboing yet because I'm on the 10am train into London Bridge. Tell a lie, I just did a search through Digg on the my aggregator and this came up (which is close but not the same) this came up.. I'll digg it when I get back online in about 20mins. Looking at the date of the Digg story (7:30am) its still too early for most of the Western world and may not have had time to circlate yet. Steve did say this was a exclusive to Security now and he's only known about it for about a day at most. Anyhow, we shall see what happens. By the way the people who came out of this smelling pretty sweet has to be Hackers. If it wasn't for hackers and reverse engineering we would never know. This is critical to remember no matter how it turns out.

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Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io