Edmund Storms wrote: > Thanks Stephen and Jed, your description makes my concern much less > rational. I keep reading about the various ways the Windows operating > system is hacked because it is poorly written. Its good to hear that > systems are being developed that don't have these problems and are > written to be less sensitive to virus and other kinds of code changes.
Indeed. But in defense of Windows, keep in mind that the single biggest reason it gets attacked 50 times more frequently than Linux is that it's about 50 times more popular. If your goal is to take over a few hundred systems, and you figure your trojan/retrovirus/whatever is only going to successfully infect one system in 10,000 which it contacts, you'd better pick a popular target. And the professional hackers, the ones who create zombie armies for DOS attacks and who-knows-what other nefarious schemes, are shooting for thousands or tens of thousands of 'slave' systems, so they need a really big pool of targets to go after. The first Internet Worm hit Unix systems, by the way. Major Unix shops like BBN were off the internet for days while they tried to pick up the pieces. (I think it might have come in through the Finger daemon port but I could be all wet about that.)
