Clean System to Zombie Bot in Four Minutes

Amadaeus writes "According to the latest study by USA Today and Avantgarde, it takes less than 4 minutes for an unpatched Windows XP SP1 system to become part of a botnet. Avantgarde has the statistics in their abstract. Stats of note: Although Macs and PC's got hit with equal opportunity, the XP SP1 machine was hit with 5 LSASS and 4 DCOM exploits while the Mac remained clean. The Linux desktop also was impenetrable, but only was only targeted by 0.26% of all attacks." See also our story on the survival time for unpatched systems.

Comments

Re:Hey, cool.

[MaestroRC]

As someone else replied, that means they were non-functional. Pretty useless in a home setup.

While I am a mac user (only for the last year though), I am a windows admin by trade. Why did you not state in your article that while the mac *was* getting attacked almost as much as windows, it was much more secure in that nothing broke through? You stated that "if they had been written to exploit OS X, they would have been successful". Find me something that will exploit samba successfully that can grant root (install) access on a mac, and I will agree with you. However, even with SMBd getting attacked, and even if there were an exploit that could take it over, it still would be unable to get admin access to make the mac a zombie, because of the secure nature of OS X.

You said yourself "it was fun watching all the windows attacks fail on OSX", which merely means that it was getting attacked so much BECAUSE the exploits thought it was windows. This is not a reason that OS X should be ranked "less secure". The real winner in your survey is OSX here, not SP2.