EBAY and AMAZON

Tue Jun 12 17:19:52 UTC 2012

> From: Michael R. Wayne [mailto:wayne at staff.msen.com]

> On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 11:44:44AM +0000, Jamie Bowden wrote:

> > While MS may be a favorite whipping boy, let's not pretend that if
> > the dominant OS were Apple or some flavor of *nix, things would be any
> > better.

> There is an inherent advantage for anything based upon *BSD.  It
> was developed in an evironment where in order to continue to operate
> it was required to defend itself against many users who wished to
> exploit the O/S. Windows, being designed for a single-user environment,
> made a number of design decisions which directly conflict with
> security.

I've been running FBSD since 1994, so I'm well aware of the development model, thanks.  The *BSDs and Linux have all had their share of holes in them and more still continue to be found.  The only thing saving them is lack of market share.  Apple's increasing market share is a nice demonstration of this at work.

As far as securing Windows, it can be done, and done well, but it requires policy enforcement at the hardware and personnel level, and that doesn't change no matter what OS you're running.  I have hardened Windows systems, and they are no more of a pain the ass to use than the hardened *nix systems.  When DSS is done with them, all OS's suck to use.

Jamie