[153797] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: EBAY and AMAZON
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Astro Dog)
Wed Jun 13 08:19:06 2012
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2012 08:17:49 -0400
From: "Astro Dog" <astrodog@gmx.com>
To: "Rich Kulawiec" <rsk@gsp.org>,nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
(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.
