EBAY and AMAZON

Wed Jun 13 12:17:49 UTC 2012

(Sorry for the top post. Mail client is being obnoxious.)

 Why? The prevalence of malware for a given OS is going to, generally, be a matter of most return for least work.
 If you're writing malware to steal credit card numbers, say, you're much better served writing it for Windows than you are OSX or Linux,
 even if it were slightly more difficult to do, because that will get you the largest number of card numbers, simply because more people use
 Windows. It's generally safe to assume that malware writers want to target as many machines as possible, thus they will focus on Windows, reg
 ardless of the relative ease or difficulty of the other platforms.

 There is no reason to believe that the platform distribution of malware would have a linear relationship with general usage rates or ease of
 exploitation, given the motivations and methods involved.

 --- Harrison
----- Original Message -----
From: Rich Kulawiec
Sent: 06/13/12 06:55 AM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: EBAY and AMAZON

 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. I've heard this argument many times, and I reject it this time as I have before. If popularity were the measure of relative OS security, then we would expect to see infection rates proportional to deployment rates: thus if operating systems A, B and C respectively accounted for 85%, 10%, and 5% of deployments, we should see those numbers reflected in infection rates.