Slashdot Mirror
Cisco Working to Block Viruses at the Router
macmouse writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has an article about Cisco and Anti-Virus companies working together to block viruses at the ISP (Router) level. It sounds like they will be using traffic shaping to block malicious traffic. Looking at it in an negative light however, it might mean that your required to have anti-virus software installed in order to use the internet. This can be a *big* problem for *nix/mac users which normally don't need or use AV software. Not to mention, being forced to purchase software from 'company x,y or z' in order to get online, regardless of platform. Hopefully, this is not going to happen."
No, No, NO.
The reason is NOT because Windows is more insecure, or easier to write viruses for, even if that is the case. The reason is the market saturation. 90% of the worlds desktops are running some 32-bit version of Windows, that's a helluva lot of machines to infect. People who write viruses with malicious intentions do it to bring down major infrastructure, and they can do this easily if they infect a few hundred thousand Windows boxes. And the more people that use Windows, the more viruses there will be.
What if everyone used Linux or Macintosh, and there was no Windows boxes left? Then virus coders would work night and day on exploits and trojans for Linux and Mac. It's a matter of deciding on a goal ("to bring down a whole chunk of the global network infrastructure") and then forming a plan ("get all Windows machines to spew out compressed UDP packets of dumbass to every known host").
In conclusion, don't be so smug with your Linux machine during the next round of Welchia or Klez, because if Linux had the desktop market share of Windows, then YOU'D be feeling the pain.