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Ask Slashdot: Who's Going To Win the Malware Arms Race?
An anonymous reader writes: We've been in a malware arms race since the 1990s. Malicious hackers keep building new viruses, worms, and trojan horses, while security vendors keep building better detection and removal algorithms to stop them. Botnets are becoming more powerful, and phishing techniques are always improving — but so are the mitigation strategies. There's been some back and forth, but it seems like the arms race has been pretty balanced, so far. My question: will the balance continue, or is one side likely to take the upper hand over the next decade or two? Which side is going to win? Do you imagine an internet, 20 years from now, where we don't have to worry about what links we click or what attachments we open? Or is it the other way around, with threats so hard to block and DDoS attacks so rampant that the internet of the future is not as useful as it is now?
That model (locked down like ChromeOS or iOS) is already succeeding in the marketplace over more traditional computing models, because it's what most people want. It's safer for them, and they want their devices to "just work".
It's the inevitable end result. Except for some techies, almost everybody I know just wants to surf the web and send pictures to their friends and have that "just work". They have almost all given up on Windows in favor of mobile OSs for 99% of what they do. They sometimes still "have a PC", but don't use it much out of fear of malware, where they feel free to use the tablet, which has the side benefit of a much simpler interface for them.
Market pressure will drive this.