On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 08:39:14AM +0000, Rev Simon Rumble wrote: > This one time, at band camp, Mike MacCana wrote: > > > The only truth of the matter is that Linux gets *many fewer* 'viruses' > > because: > [snip] > > * Its less popular than Windows (not a main reason, but this is true). > > Actually this is almost the only reason! All this shit about root > privileges and all that, sure but there are exploits around that kind > of thing. The real reason is simple: why go for a difficult target > when at best you'll infect a few thousand machines. Instead, go for > the easy, completely unprotected targets and infect hundreds of > thousands.
Even if Linux/Unix systems were a majority, the infection rate would still be a lot lower, due to diversity of configurations within the Linux sphere. One of the dangers of "category killers" like Apache - everyone runs it. FTP and SMTP servers, on the other hand, are many and varied, so a worm that uses one of them isn't going to get anywhere *near* the infection level enjoyed by most Windows worms and viruses. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html