Is Your OS Tough Enough?

LE UI Guy writes "A Denver Post article examines the Internet 'horrors' Windows, Mac and Linux users face simply being connected to the Internet with only an out-of-box configuration. Over the course of a single week the machines were scanned 46,255 times. The test didn't look into additional security threats caused by surfing the web or reading e-mail, just the connection itself."

Comments

Of course

[jdwest]

If you build it, they will come.

Not News

[swillden]

This news isn't news. What's news is this news is in the news!

Re:Yet again...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how MS can sleep at night

Obligatory: On piles and piles of money. :-)

-1 Off topic

[Mudcathi]

Over the course of a single week the machines were scanned 46,255 times.

I got stuck in the self-checkout line at Walmart once, behind a lady who had this same problem.

/sucked!

Don't bother reading the article

[cecom]

TFA tells us that Windows XP SP2 is more secure than Windows XP SP1 (unbelievable!!) and that there are fewer attackers targeting Linux and MacOS than Windows (hmmm - I wonder why ?).

Very thought provoking and innovative information indeed.

Virus Scan

[null etc.]

SP 1 was attacked 4,857 times. It was infested within 18 minutes by the Blaster and Sasser worms. Within an hour it became a "bot," or a machine controlled by a remote computer, and began attacking other Windows computers.

From what I remember in Tron, this visually looks very cool. Digital warriors fighting on a neon grid, etc.

I'm pretty stumped, though. I tried to get my box pwned eight times, just to see the digital battle. I thought at the least Norton Antivirus would sent a digital probe destroyer bot out to eradicate the trojans. But all that happened was my computer got really slow, and pop-ups kept showing up, advertising herbal virility pills for men.

Come to think of it, Hollywood movies never seem to match up with what my computer does. That's it, I'm going to stop believing them movies and start reading Wikipedia instead.

*nix will be a major target of worms in the future

[Kip Winger]

Despite Linux being hardened, its basis still is Unix -- which, from the beginning, was coded with such grevious insecurities, such as using a blank gets() at the beginning of crucial protocols. Worms ripped apart Unix in the 80s, and despite what has been hardened since, the methodologies which ripped Unix apart in the 80s mostly are still being used in Windows development.

Microsoft might have something with Windows Longhorn, since the entire API outside of the kernel will be written in C# completely sandboxed in a CLR, much like Java.

Combined with a monolithic auto-update system, Microsoft has no intentions of repeating the problems of Windows 2000/XP when they release Longhorn, much like they had no intention of repeating the problems of stability they had with Windows 95/98/ME when they designed Windows 2000/XP. For as much as they do, they mostly won with stability in 2000/XP, and they could win again, despite their market share, by sacrificing RAM (480MB commit charge, 1GB recommended) and processing power by implementing the .NET framework for their entire API.

I honestly hope open source has something to compete for their future desktop environments, or else desktop Linux could be relegated to processors too slow to deal with the overhead.