Admins say Linux Much More Secure than Windows

Golygydd Max writes "Linux is more secure than Windows. It's something that we've all heard before; however, this is not the opinion of yet another consultant but the opinion of sysadmins themselves. A survey of 6,000 IT staff by BZ Research, reported by Techworld, has found that 74 percent considered Linux secure or very secure, as opposed to 58 percent who found Windows to be insecure."

Comments

The interesting part...

[Otter]

Obviously anti-Microsoft spin needs to take top billing, but the interesting point in there is this:

Linux developer preference for commercial distributions has declined steadily since 2003, when it was twice the rate for non-commercial, Evans Data's Spring 2005 Linux Development Survey found. Six months ago the preferences were roughly equal, and now 34 percent prefer non-commercial, compared with 28 percent who prefer a commercial version, the remainder having no preference.

The change is a sign that non-commercial Linux is becoming increasingly easy to use and maintain, without the need for commercial technical support, said Evans chief operating officer John Andrews. Eighty-five percent of developers said the biggest advantage of noncommercial distributions was the ease and cost of upgrades and maintenance.

"Increasingly easy to use" is probably true, but I'm thinking the real story buried in there is how much of their business userbase Red Hat has given up in the last couple of years...

News flash...

[Anonymous Coward]

News flash! Bagels and cream cheese popular together!

On the other hand...

[JamesTRexx]

I'm not using Linux, but FreeBSD, and I must say not only does it feel safer, but it feels more comfortable to work on. Just the ability to work from the commandline and the ability to really kill processes without getting messages that I have no access to them makes me life easier.
And after reading the piece on the Longhorn demo I thought why they make such a fuss over things that's already here with KDE. (can't tell about the Apple, never used it)
In my humble opinion, Microsoft has to catch up with at least FreeBSD, and most likely GNU/Linux as well.

Re:On the other hand...

[BoomerSooner]

I have to disagree. MS is a lot easier for me to keep up to date. I prefer linux but having both systems rooted in my younger days linux (depending on your distro and installed packages) is a bit more work to stay on top of.

That being said Linux is significantly more secure in my opinion. Which is why I lock down my MS based servers behind Linux based firewalls.

In other news

[EvilNutSack]

The earth is round.

Low response rate?

[maunleon]

Does the lack of response to this article means that we are all sick of "Linux R00lz!" propaganda?

Please. a Commodore 64 is much more secure than Linux. Try breaking into it from the internet.

I'll put a properly configured Windows 20003 server againt a properly configured Linux server. Neither will win. On the other hand, a Windows 2003 server with a good admin, will be significantly more secure than a linux one with a bad admin.

Concerning the windows-knowledge of many admins

[fluor2]

I would like to include my opinion here.

I know a LOT of admins (im an admin myself). And I must point out that 90% know VERY little about Windows security. E.g. "Have you ever configured a Group Policy before?" And most of them would say "Har har! Group Policy? Is that something new that creates a blue screen?".

Well I've got news for you. Windows is VERY secure nowadays. BUT it require admins to lock-down the OS (e.g. do not give users admin-rights or similar). By looking at our own stats at my workplace, the largest security problem nowadays is NFS and mis-configured Linux computers. BTW did I also mention that most of the Windows boxes have a far better on-line time than Linux? I know they have to reboot quite often, but that's about it. The reboots are at night-time anyways.

Re:Concerning the windows-knowledge of many admins

[Punboy]

What do you mean a "far better online time"? You mean they dont get hacked as fast? Thats a laugh. You must be new to slashdot or something, cause in the last... year or so there have been AT LEAST 5 articles showing that a Windows machine gets hacked into in almost 1/0th the time as a Linux machine. Just for the record, my home network file/database server has been up and running for 682 days, 4 hours, 32 minutes, and 7 seconds. Running Debian. Which is a linux distro.

Let's compare a square peg and a round hole

[jago25_98]

Mu! damnit! http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MuAnswer

You know, I'd stick my neck out here and say NO! It depends! This is all about default settings.

What IS Windows? What IS linux?

Is Windows a machine ruinning an old copy of IE with a single auto-login user running as admin?, hundereds of services running from the likes of nvidia and ATi, - to most minds the assumption is yes.

And I know for one my linux box isn't setup as tight as it could be because I know how much hassle that entails. The process running this browser has enough permissions to wipe out my data drive; I like to save pictures there after all. What am I to do - setup sudo to another user and script it's launch? - how many do that? Do you?

Is linux a 2.6 kernel and Firefox?

This is all very silly.
One day something will pop up that will hijack Firefox or Konqueror (more likely as less frequently updated) just the same as IE. If it has less of an effect it'll be due to linux users keeping an eye on things.