Steve Jolly
Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:39:18 -0700
Sean DALY wrote:
I listened to a discussion on the World Service radio The World Today programme yesterday morning, and I was disturbed at the sloppy reporting: although botnet machines are exclusively running Windows because of the poor Microsoft security model, this was not mentioned. In fact, OSX was cited as being as vulnerable as Windows, which is just silly. Although the three basic steps to security cited (patching, firewall, and antivirus) are useful to a general nontechnical audience, it's not a minor point that in the past ten years there have been thousands of virii, keyloggers, and rootkits which have attacked Windows, while those attacking GNU/Linux and OSX can be counted on the fingers of one's hands.
Not sure I'm convinced - all operating systems have their vulnerabilities; telling *the general public* that they can worry less if they're using a less popular OS than Windows would just lead to complacency. Telling people to patch regularly, use a firewall and install antivirus software is the only safe general advice you can give.
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