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Is Your OS Tough Enough?

Posted by timothy on from the mepis-seems-to-do-alright dept.

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."

3 of 597 comments (clear)

  1. Re:idiot... by rpbailey1642 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Wow, that was an angry response. Yes, I did read the article before I posted, that's how I knew they did upgrades on Win XP SP2 and none of the other systems. The article explictly stated that the Win XP SP1 system was exploited by Blaster and Sasser in under 18 minutes, which is good enough to call them "hacked". There are three faults with the second part of your argument stating that if they haven't upgraded to SP2 they deserved to be hacked. In the first, there are those who can not upgrade due to programs (custom jobs, programs no longer supported by their manufacturers) that will no longer work with SP2. In the second, there are those who turned off (or had a "helpful" tech turn off) their automatic updates and have no idea how to update their system. Yes, they should know their computers better, but that's a debate for another time and it's one that we've rehashed time and time again. In the third, they only updated Win XP SP2. Had they done all the upgrades on all the systems, I have a feeling the Win system would still not have fared as well as the UNIX-based systems. Remember, there *HAVE* been exploits for XP SP2 in the wild already. Granted, XP SP2 is a step in the right direction, but it is nowhere near perfect. Viruses, spyware, etc are still a problem.

    You are anonymous, and most likely you are attempting to troll. I probably should not have bitten but what can I say, it gave me the chance to rant a bit.

  2. Re:Of course by MoriaOrc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Except, as the article says, WinXP SP1 is still quite common. Hell, I still use Win2k SP4. I wish they'd run the test with that.

  3. Whats an attack? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The article makes great mention of "attacks" but fails to mention what an "attack" actually consists of.

    For example: they say Windows XP SP2 got attacked 16 times.

    Does that mean it got port scanned 16 times? It can't as i'm sure it got port scanned many more times than that.
    or
    Does that mean it got infected 16 times? It can't because they said it survived all attacks.

    So what on earth were these attacks?