Bob Estes wrote:
The vet I take my pets to doesn't accept email, because of all the
viruses etc., he was always getting. He doesn't seem to realize that
running Windows is the cause of the problem and he wouldn't have to
worry about that, if he ran Linux.
That's because Linux only has a very small segment of the market. If
Linux gains a larger market share, then the idiots that write viruses
will begin to write viruses for Linux.
Anyone who makes that claim simply doesn't understand how the
vulnerabilities occur. When you look at web servers, over 75 % of them
run Apache on Linux or Unix, yet it's the servers running IIS that get
clobbered. Why is this? Take a look at the various security methods
between the two systems, such as in Linux or Unix, in order for a virus
to run, it has to be deliberately made executable. It simply won't run
otherwise. Then, since Linux users rarely run as root, even if a virus
some how takes hold, it's damage is limited to only those areas that the
user has write access. There are many other reasons. One of my
favourites involves the Netscape vs Microsoft case, where Netscape was
suing MS over the forced bundling of IE on all Windows computers. At
that time, IE was just another application, just like Netscape.
However, MS claimed in court that IE couldn't be removed because it was
part of the operating system and sure enough, next version of Windows
(W98 IIRC), IE was deeply embedded in the operating system, to the point
that IE vulnerabilities became OS vulnerabilities and malware would then
have run of the system. The list of reasons for MS security weakness is
a long one and has little to do with number of targ^H^H^H^H users.
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