begin quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 04:56:01AM -0800: > Tracy R Reed wrote: > > >Windows apologists have always said that the only reason Linux doesn't > >have viruses (or worms, which are the same for the purpose of this > >discussion) is because it is not nearly as common as Windows, disregarding > >the vastly different security model. > > The Amiga was less common than just about any other platform, and yet > none came close to how vulnerable it was to virus attack. To the best > of my memory, no other exceeded the Amiga in its rate of introduction > and proliferation of new virus incantations.
The Amiga had a nifty little feature -- when you inserted a floppy disk, the system would essentially read the bootblock, and then run it, and that piece of code would mount the disk. It allowed for all sorts of neat behavior -- different sounds played when you inserted a floppy, etc. etc. It also proved to be an obvious vector for viruses. It made them EASY. However, a portion of the community soon learned that the way to avoid virus problems was to identify and refrain from unsafe behavior. That portion of the community typically had few to no problems with viruses; the rest of the community followed the siren-song of virus-checkers and tried to solve the problem with technology. A technological solution that does not change the behavior of users is doomed to be only partially effective. If all of those MSWindows users were to start using Linux today, we'd have the same virus problem in fairly short order. > >The traditional response has been to point out that Apache has a much > >larger market share than IIS yet IIS has many more security problems, > >exploits, viruses, etc. than Apache. > > Excellent point. Didn't we just have a exploit in apache recently? -Stewart "Attack the user, not the system, their easier targets" Stremler -- KPLUG-List mailing list [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
