nanog mailing list archives
Re: EBAY and AMAZON
From: "Astro Dog" <astrodog () gmx com>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2012 08:17:49 -0400
(Sorry for the top post. Mail client is being obnoxious.) Why? The prevalence of malware for a given OS is going to, generally, be a matter of most return for least work. If you're writing malware to steal credit card numbers, say, you're much better served writing it for Windows than you are OSX or Linux, even if it were slightly more difficult to do, because that will get you the largest number of card numbers, simply because more people use Windows. It's generally safe to assume that malware writers want to target as many machines as possible, thus they will focus on Windows, reg ardless of the relative ease or difficulty of the other platforms. There is no reason to believe that the platform distribution of malware would have a linear relationship with general usage rates or ease of exploitation, given the motivations and methods involved. --- Harrison ----- Original Message ----- From: Rich Kulawiec Sent: 06/13/12 06:55 AM To: nanog () nanog org Subject: Re: EBAY and AMAZON On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 11:44:44AM +0000, Jamie Bowden wrote: > While MS may be a favorite whipping boy, let's not pretend that if the > dominant OS were Apple or some flavor of *nix, things would be any better. I've heard this argument many times, and I reject it this time as I have before. If popularity were the measure of relative OS security, then we would expect to see infection rates proportional to deployment rates: thus if operating systems A, B and C respectively accounted for 85%, 10%, and 5% of deployments, we should see those numbers reflected in infection rates.
Current thread:
- Re: EBAY and AMAZON, (continued)
- Re: EBAY and AMAZON Barry Shein (Jun 13)
- Re: EBAY and AMAZON Dave Hart (Jun 13)
- Re: EBAY and AMAZON Barry Shein (Jun 13)
- RE: EBAY and AMAZON Keith Medcalf (Jun 13)
- Re: EBAY and AMAZON Rich Kulawiec (Jun 13)
- vulnerability and popularity (was: EBAY and AMAZON) Andrew Sullivan (Jun 13)
- Re: vulnerability and popularity (was: EBAY and AMAZON) Aled Morris (Jun 13)
- Re: vulnerability and popularity (was: EBAY and AMAZON) Owen DeLong (Jun 13)
- Re: EBAY and AMAZON Doug Barton (Jun 13)
- Re: EBAY and AMAZON Jimmy Hess (Jun 12)
- Re: EBAY and AMAZON JC Dill (Jun 13)
- Re: EBAY and AMAZON valdis . kletnieks (Jun 13)
- Re: EBAY and AMAZON Jeroen van Aart (Jun 14)