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Windows Is 'Insecure By Design,' Says Washington Post
Circuit Breaker writes "A Washington Post article says Microsoft Windows is insecure by design. Quote: 'Between the Blaster worm and the Sobig virus, it's been a long two weeks for Windows users. But nobody with a Mac or a Linux PC has had to lose a moment of sleep over these outbreaks -- just like in earlier "malware" epidemics. This is not a coincidence.'"
the author makes nice (partial if you may)rebuttal of this myth, and also points to something to back it up like the number of open ports that create potential possibilities for holes,and that are for services that are default enabled, yet shouldn't be used in hostile environment(and how ms does nothing about it, and how xp was supposed to be more secure in matters like this). and frankly i haven't heard of non-hostile environment involving more than 10 people in a deserted island with lots of food and jolly sunshine happiness to keep them away from their computers.
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world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Funny how 95% of PC users have Windows, I wonder why a Virus writer would want to target Windows??!? Perhaps that is why so many exploits are found, because people are targeting it religously, start targeting Mac and Linux as much and see who is insecure
Actually, virus writers write virii targetting windows machines because windows machines are easy targets, not because there are so many licenses sold.
According to Netcraft's site survey only a quarter of active sites run Windows leaving the bulk of the public internet running on *nix.
I suspect much of the 95% of PCs you speak of are safely walled up in institutions, schools and corporations private networks, which are generally out of scope for a worm like blaster to target.
Now koniosis, what you should impress you is that *nix's run the majority of public sites on the internet, (those sites most easily attacked, i might add) with a marked minority of serious compromises as compared to Windows. More sites, less bugs. Simple.
Finally, only a Microsoft employee could think that its justified that the amount of embarrasing code compromises grow proportionally to desktop marketshare.
XP's firewall is off by default and takes at least five steps to turn on
I seem to recall XP's firewall being turned on during the inital "Welcome to Windows" wizard that pops up after installation, if you choose the option "This machine will be directly connected to the internet" (Or something like that).
That being said, I always turned the firewall OFF, it was too much of a pain to set up additional ports to allow.
Since then, I've moved to a Mac, and OS X's firewall is much easier to configure.
I certainly agree with the rest of your points though (and the majority of the article).
This includes security updates and point-revisions of the OS (which one might presume to have less-critical security updates rolled into them), and excludes application specific updates for the i-App suite, Safari, etc. that were not labelled as "Security" related (one might assert that they were in fact security related, but they included point-upgrades to the applications as well. Those toatlled perhaps 8-10 updates over the span covered). Note that two (Stuffit! and IE) are for 3rd-party bundled apps with labelled "Security" updates.
yes, I'm aware that I haven't installed the latest one to patch the off-by-one bug that impacts the FTP server. I'm waiting until I need to reboot for some other reason.
TOTAL UPDATES OVER THE PAST 10 MONTHS: 5. 7 if you count patches to 3rd party apps, one of which was IE. 10 if you're really liberal and include the point-revisions of the OS too.
Please tell me where these "lot of security updates in the past 6 months" are... I'm not seeing them.