Worms Jack Up the Total Cost of Windows

rbrandis writes "Dealing with widespread worms like Sasser raises the cost of using Windows, a research analyst said Wednesday. "This is part of the carrying cost of using Windows," said Mark Nicolett, research director at Gartner. "The cost of a Windows environment has gone up because enterprises have to install security patches very rapidly, deal with outages caused by secondary problems with these patches, and deploy additional layers of security technology." "The Sasser worm attacks confirm our prediction that mass worm attacks against the multiple vulnerabilities disclosed by Microsoft on April 13 were likely," said Nicolett and his Gartner colleague, John Pescatore, in an alert posted on the Gartner site."

Comments

Re:no viruses for linux yet because....

[The Snowman]

Linux is not immune to security issues, and any claim that many eyes make for few bugs and thus OSS is fundamentally safer than Windows-based equivalents can be discredited with the slightest thought about reality rather than theory. Linux remains relatively safe because of the culture surrounding it, not because it's inherently flawless.

I make no claim that Linux or any other Unix operating system is flawless, just that its network-centric multi-user system model is inherently more secure than the multi-user system hacked on top of the single-user Windows OS. I know NT is not DOS-based, but that is an argument for a different story (trying to keep this on topic). Anyway, the Unix user and permissions model is far more stable and secure than the one Windows has. The biggest threat to Linux is social engineering. That is why we must address these issues now, before the masses use Linux in force.

You are correct, however, about Linux being the server target. But look how often Linux servers are hacked as opposed to Windows servers, and how severe the hacks are.