On Feb 7, 2005, at 11:23 AM, Nick Arnett wrote:
The truth in what you say is that a properly configured Unix-ish system is more secure than a properly configured Windows machine. Unfortunately, there seems to be little shortage of misconfigured systems.
That's a better formulation of it, yes. There was at least one major distro of Linux that shipped with its security defaulted to disabled; you had to go into the admin side to activate the firewalls, etc. But not everyone knew that. Not the greatest plan.
I often get emails spoofed from unsecured mailers, many of which seem to report as being 'nix. That's just plain sloppiness on the part of those machines' sysadmins.
Definitely spammers, etc. exploit misconfigured systems; but they are vastly facilitated by sending VBscript mail worms to unsecured MS systems, which then propagate via Outlook address books.
When I get bounce messages from time to time kicking mail back to *me* that's written using Korean, Chinese or Japanese text, for instance, I have a shrewd guess what happened. Someone's MS system, with my email address in its Outlook address book, got wormed. And that system has since been propagating spam. Only it doesn't always hit a valid target so I get a sendmail bounce back to the "from" address.
That's just not happening on 'nix based systems. All I'm suggesting is that MS's VBS is the greatest facilitator of spam and virus ever developed in the history of computers or programming. I think it's a fair assertion.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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