[ShoobieRat]

I'm beginning to think the British have an 'MI' for everything from gumdrops to global assassins. Oh well. Here's the latest from MI2G:

The British security firm mi2g has concluded a comprehensive 12-month study to identify the safest 24/7 computing environment.

In the end, the open source BSD and Mac OS X came out on top with the fewest security breaches against permanently connected machines worldwide in homes, small businesses, large enterprises and governments.

The study found Linux to be the most breached environment 'in terms of manual hacker attacks overall and accounts for 65.64% of all breaches recorded'.

Windows was the most breached environment in government computing and led Linux, BSD and Mac OS X by far in economic damage caused by breaches.

I thought the British only had computers to keep track of the Scots?

[Inaris]

just some more commonents on the subject...

Malware proliferation

The recent global malware epidemics have primarily targeted the Windows computing environment and have not caused any significant economic damage to environments running Open Source including Linux, BSD and Mac OS X. When taking the economic damage from malware into account over the last twelve months, including the impact of MyDoom, NetSky, SoBig, Klez and Sasser, Windows has become the most breached computing environment in the world accounting for most of the productivity losses associated with malware - virus, worm and trojan - proliferation. This is directly the result of very insignificant quantities of highly damaging mass-spreading malware being written for other computing environments like Linux, BSD and Mac OS X.

This is my favorite

"More and more smart individuals, government agencies and corporations are shifting towards Apple and BSD environments in 2004," according to DK Matai, Executive Chairman, mi2g. "For how long can the truth remain hidden that the great emperors of the software industry are wearing no clothes fit for the fluid environment in which computing takes place, where new threats manifest every hour of every day. There is an accelerating paradigm shift visible in 2004 and busy professionals have spotted the benefits of Apple and BSD because they don't have the time to cope with umpteen flavours of Linux or to wait for Microsoft's Longhorn when Windows XP has proved to be a stumbling block in some well chronicled instances."

[ShoobieRat]

This is directly the result of very insignificant quantities of highly damaging mass-spreading malware being written for other computing environments like Linux, BSD and Mac OS X.

Interesting, huh? See, I knew those hackers were smart. I knew they spent more time on Windows because the impact was greater.

Of course, if you notice in my previous post, Linux bears the brunt of most direct hacker attacks (and gets eaten alive by them). Windows has such a huge user group, and has such a wide range of users, that the target is greater. Plus, no other OS is as widely connected as the Windows OS. It's not as easy to attack the other OS's because they're so strung out, unlike Windows which is practically everywhere in the world, chained from business to business through 24/7 emails, servers, and other networking/business-related processes.

Securing an OS distributed and used on the scale of Windows is a monumental task. I say it again: "It's amazing Windows functions at all!" A true testament to those underpaid, underappriciated programmers.

Heh.