On June 24, 2003 at 12:11 pbaker(_at_)verisign(_dot_)com (Hallam-Baker,
Phillip) wrote:
Points of information:
The DDoS exploits against the DNS roots were launched from Linux
boxes.
I don't remember that "DDoS" causing a whole lot of trouble for the
net in general, a la spam.
That's not an accident, a ping flood directed at 13 specific machines
one night is awfully different in nature than billions and billions of
spams directed at hundreds of millions of machines daily for years.
Worms existed on the Internet and DECNet long before Windows
Worms are not viruses.
The first internet worm, I believe the one the term was created for,
was the Morris worm which would be October 1988.
According to:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/winhistoryintro.mspx
Windows 1.0 was released on November 10, 1983, about 5 years earlier.
I suppose you could quibble semantics on what's a worm and what's a
virus and so forth to fit your pre-conceived conclusions.
Worms and viruses will always do better if they attack a common platform
than a rare one for the simple reason that to propagate a virus need only
pass the infection on to an average of more than one new host per host
infected.
That sounds reasonable, except that's not the problem.
The problem is a memory and protection architecture in windows which
allows programs run by any non-privileged user to infect boot blocks
etc.
Most other OS's (of any note) don't allow this.
As far as I can tell MS can't "fix" this because too many applications
rely on these backdoors for performance.
Put another way, fixing it would break too many commercially viable
applications.
So we all suffer, even if we avoid MS products.
None of the O/S platforms in use today scores well on the security front.
Nonsense, several score quite well if just reasonably configured and
administered (and I don't mean heroics.)
The problem is there is nothing you can do with any current windows
system to make it secure from viruses, short of active avoidance (shut
it off and it won't ever get a virus, proceed from there to your risk
comfort level.)
Microsoft is the only company to have made a public recognition of this
fact.
Oh what utter nonsense. Have you no shame.
--
-Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | bzs(_at_)TheWorld(_dot_)com |
http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD
The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*
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