Does North Korea have inside info for cyberwar?

Editor's note: Russ McGuire is the online director of Business Reform Magazine. Each issue of Business Reform features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.

In January, Microsoft announced the Government Security Program (GSP), under which governments around the world will be given access to Microsoft source code. Theoretically, the program exists to convince government buyers that Windows is secure enough for their purposes. However, with Microsoft customers already suffering from widespread hacker attacks, one has to wonder at the wisdom of giving such unprecedented information to the U.S.' historic enemies, especially those with close ties to rogue nations who are openly hostile to our government and economy.

This past week, China became the fourth government to join the GSP, following Russia, NATO, and the United Kingdom.

This move should strike fear in the hearts and minds of information technology executives around the world, but especially here in the United States. Unfortunately, the GSP may accelerate the fulfillment of prophesies by Open Source advocates that sparked Microsoft's program in the first place.

Open Source is all about openly sharing the source code for software products. Source code is the raw programming commands that programmers write and modify to make software work. With Open Source, anyone can get the source code and anyone can offer an improved version of the product (including the source code). A major benefit of this approach has been the ability for thousands of developers around the world to collaboratively advance the capabilities of software products – much more rapidly than a single company could achieve the same progress. Since no single company is bearing the cost of development, and since the products have a built in viral marketing network, the products typically can be brought to market at much lower prices (often free for unsupported versions) than equivalent proprietary products.

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The net result has been a base set of products that have rapidly begun to approach the functionality of market leading commercial products, often with greater reliability, and always at a lower price point. The flagship of the Open Source movement is the Linux operating system, which is rapidly taking market share from Windows even among the most discriminating enterprise buyers. This is a threat that Microsoft is not taking lightly.

However, the most significant threat for Microsoft has been the Open Source movement's claims that Microsoft's proprietary model makes it very susceptible to security attacks. Open Source advocates claim that it is highly unlikely that potential security holes in the software will be identified and fixed by Microsoft programmers before they are discovered and exploited by potential hackers.

In contrast, Open Source software is "owned" by thousands of entities, and is constantly undergoing "peer reviews" by developers primarily driven by pride in excellence rather than market deadlines or profit margins. Under this model, Open Source advocates claim that potential holes are identified, closed, communicated, and fixed before serious damage can occur.

Of course, recent history certainly seems to validate these claims. The vast majority of major hacker attacks have been successfully targeted at Microsoft products. While Open Source products have had well publicized security problems, to date anyway, the software collectives have rapidly developed and implemented solutions.

By placing highly valuable and potentially destructive information about the innermost security secrets of their products into the hands of a relatively small number of, by definition, politically motivated entities, Microsoft is taking a huge risk. Worse yet, they are placing all of us who rely on Microsoft products at incredible peril, all in the name of protecting their market share.

If this move isn't enough to drive corporate and government customers to abandon Microsoft in favor of Linux and Open Source solutions, then perhaps we deserve what we have coming to us.

Russ McGuire is Online Director for Business Reform. Prior to joining Business
Reform, Mr. McGuire spent over twenty years in technology industries, performing various roles from writing mission critical software for the nuclear power and defense industries to developing core business strategies in the telecom industry. Mr. McGuire is currently focused on helping businesspeople apply God's eternal truths to their real-world business challenges through Business Reform's online services. He can be reached at [email protected].