Quote:
Originally Posted by brk-lnt
The quantity of each platform and the correlation to virus and exploit issues is an oft-repeated urban myth.
Linux is widely used on webservers around the world. Apple has been eating steady marketshare away from Windows in the consumer market for years now. Both have installations of 10's, if not hundreds, of millions of active machines. Plenty enough to make them a target of virii and exploits.
Each OS has its own pros and cons, and the security of the core OS itself is one thing, then there is how easy that OS (or other pre-installed software like IE) makes it for rogue code to be downloaded and executed.
The core of the Windows OS is pretty secure. Their UI model and other aspects of the software, not so much. Windows is "secure", but more easily exploited than linux or OSX due to how applications can be installed and run without direct user interaction or awareness.
|
Well it's said that apple is eating away Microsoft's market share, but the numbers speak to that, see here:
http://www.netmarketshare.com/operat...=9&qpcustomb=0
So it would stand to reason that anyone looking to data mine or exploit an operating system would target the windows desktop, especially since so many are used in places of business which is a target rich environment. No doubt with the popularity of smart phones and portable devices they too will become of more interest to hackers. Thing is that many users of both desktops and mobile devices have little knowledge as to what they are doing and many exploits are passed along due to ignorance of the user, often times gaining access to a system with the logged on account having full unrestricted rights to the operating system than anything else. There is only so much any manufacturer can do to curb that, IE can't fix stupid! An email with an attachment that is executed with malicious code as an example can just as easily screw any computer up, whether it be a windows system with a user logged on with full administrative rights, or a user on a UNIX system logged in as root. I would assert also that most folks that run a LINUX desktop are not your average dare I say ignorant user. Therefore they would tend to be more judicious in how they setup and use their systems.
Stuff like this can be argued till the cows come home, my only point was to show that the Java exploit was in the JRE and if installed doesn't matter what OS it's on the system is vulnerable. That is not a poor reflection on any of the operating system manufacturers, it's the JRE to blame in this case!