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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Neil Williams wrote:
It is already known that exploits do exist in GNU/Linux but these are patched quickly and there is little excuse for systems not being updated.
I remain to be convinced on the "patched quickly".
For example, one possible reason virus writers tend to pick on windows is that if you're going to write a virus you might as well write it to infect the most widely used OS.
I think there is a more specific issue here, in that Windows XP was so poorly deployed, and Microsoft so slow to address the issues that arose (not all of their making), that it generated a business for criminals exploiting that weakness. The vast bulk of compromised PCs are I suspect compromised for profit (predominantly spamming/phishing services but that is changing). It is quite a small number of people involved in this black market, perhaps only a handful in the actual coding, although there is kind of a hobbiest botnet thing happening as a result.
The problem for Windows has always been this spread - historically it has been far too easy to infect one Windows machine from another.
But this is in part a problem due to numbers. With any epidemic there are critical masses effects, where each infected item must infect slightly more than one other to propagate successfully. That said GNU/Linux is well past the point in terms of connectedness and numbers where viruses became epidemic in DOS. DOS boxes at my University were almost continuously infected with viruses, even before the Universities were connected via Internet protocol, and I don't think any of them were propagated worm fashion, they just lived mostly on floppy boot sectors, or in executables. But how much this illustrates that GNU/Linux is more secure, and how much it illustrates the diversity of the boxes involved is hard to decide by mere observation.
This has nothing to do with users - some of the most damaging malware on Windows attacked servers and spread between Windows servers.
The MS SQL worm was a wake up call for application level security issues. Of course there should never have been so many boxes listening on the Internet for MS SQL connections in the first place, but I know people who still do this, mostly because the VPN or other secure type connections are just too painful to configure. But MS SQL wasn't the only database with stupid default account settings ;) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFCeSTOGFXfHI9FVgYRAlAbAJ9Yf9Nbp7hyBUR+tW4K/e+912xROQCeKNf8 rlpSDDBCQuMJXwLhe7SpTww= =klhm -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html