But when you look at the mode of entry of the most damaging virus's in the last 18 months you see that a fair proportion of them are worms, taking advantage of flaws in the security of the system not flaws in the users of the system. Worms like the sql slammer and the recent RPC vulnerability highlight a problem that most unix like machines are not immune too. Being slack or incompetent admins.
what you seem to suggest is that if windows was not here and we all had linux machines or osx, there we wouldn't have any thing to worry about at all. In fact what i think you might find is that we have only the best of the virus's the ones that really bring the internet to its knees.
One of the strongest things Linux has going for it is the many different varieties that exist out there. It is far less likely for all the versions to be binary compatible and suffer from the same exploit. OSX is does not have this on its side.
bd
On Tuesday, October 7, 2003, at 02:11 PM, Graham Smith wrote:
On Tue, 7 Oct 2003 13:29, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Ben de Luca wrote:I believe this article backs up your statement above. I love the followingI think the major reason for a lack of virii on mac's so far is the over all small number of them.
I disagree. I've had this argument on another list and the "pervasive"
Windows argument doesn't wash. Writing exploits for Windows is
like shooting fish in a barrel. Writing exploits for MacOS (any version)
takes a lot more skill and in depth knowledge of the OS and hardware.
There are more vulnerabilities for Windows because it's too easy, not because it's more pervasive.
statement from the article.
"To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box,
you just need to work on it."
"There are about 60,000 viruses known for Windows, 40 or so for the Macintosh,
about 5 for commercial Unix versions, and perhaps 40 for Linux. Most of the
Windows viruses are not important, but many hundreds have caused widespread
damage. Two or three of the Macintosh viruses were widespread enough to be of
importance. None of the Unix or Linux viruses became widespread - most were
confined to the laboratory."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/33226.html -- Regards,
Graham Smith ---------------------------------------------------------
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
