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Yeah, some very cursory research reveals 5sec.us is a host domain for all sorts of spam and trojan badness.

Already did.

My virus scanner seemed to stop it on the proof of concept page. McAfee sees it as JS/Exploit-BO.gen

That's because I was arguing a totally different point that Windows bigots argue, that since Windows is more popular, that it gets a proportional amount of viruses.

No, you weren't. Windows "bigots" argue that since Windows is more popular, it is subject to far more malware. Proportionality is your own creation, probably because it supports your argument. I have just shown why linear proportionality is an especially poor model, and I'm not the only one that has questioned your original assertion.

Sure, you can use Metcalf's law. But then, where are the 186 viruses even using your formula?

Add up the numbers yourself:

http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruslistfind.html?fin dWhere=011&findTxt=linux

And no, we're talking about everything. You're complaining about obsfucated URL's, for God's sake. You pick viruses because Windows has automatic code execution (of course, so did MacOS prior to Mac OS X), but Linux and Unix service exploits are certainly automatable and common. Apache, Sendmail, BIND, inetd, and the list goes on and on. Either someone gets into your system and does damage or they do not. The particular method isn't of concern when you're tallying the damage.

No, rootkits don't count as they require hand-crafted attacks at single machines; not automated attacks, as in viruses and worms. There are only so many hours in the day for the black-hat hacker/script kiddie, and that's the biggest limiting factor right there.

That's plain ignorant.

http://www.spirit.com/Network/net0401.html

Automated eploitation and installation of rootkit. Would you like even more examples, or are you sufficiently embarrased as it is?

The fact is that automatic replication of code (viruses, trojans, and worms) requires more than a little bit of work from the user recieving such code. Indeed, email viruses are nonexistent on *nix (OS/X included) because propagation requires that the user save the file, chmod the execute bit to 1, and then run the file.

http://vil.mcafeesecurity.com/vil/content/v_100102 .htm

"Because the exploit is fully contained in the message it is possible for a not vulnerable mail tranport agent to forward the infected message to other systems."

Sounds like an email virus to me. It doesn't even require you to save a file and set a bit. Thanks for playing the game, but it's clear that you don't fully understand the rules.

On top of that, the little bundle of evil must also be binary compatible with the system that it discovers - in the *nix world, that's definitely not a given.

Yay! Grandma gets to attempt to COMPILE all her software before she can use it, she can't buy commercial software for her obscure configuration, and in exchange, she's completely immune from worms! Except, wait, there have been plenty of worms affecting UNIX and LINUX systems over the years, and your argument about binary incompatibility merely proves the Windows "bigots" right - the biggest bang for the least effort will attract the most collective effort. In the case of Linux, we can now further segregate that 5% into CPU families. The number of viruses predicted drops even further. It's now M verus 36M (2.5% share), or 72M (1.25% share), and 1/36^2, or 1/72^2. Better yet, it's security through obscurity, because the buffer overflow is still likely to be there, since it's a flaw in a high level language, not a CPU architecture. Pat yourself on the back for an own goal!

I think it's reasonable to use Metcalf's law to demonstrate virus propagation across a network populated with Windows machines as the machines really do have random connections between each other and that the barriers to propagation within the machines themselves are pretty low to b

I would have thought the URL was a clue:

http://www.mcafeesecurity.com/us/about/press/mcafe e_enterprise/2004/20040524_104736.htm

It's in there twice: 2004.

The press release just says May 24, perhaps they are counting on Slashdot to rehash it for them every year.