Re: Apple Computer sides with Satan

I (Brian Tung) wrote (of Windows market share --> Windows target):
> That is certainly a factor, but it is hardly *mainly* due to that.

Allan M wrote:
> Actually it is.............
>
> My older son graduated college a year ago as a programmer.
> (a VERY good one at that he is moving to downtown SF now)

Well, if it's a matter of establishing credentials, I graduated college
in 1989 in electrical engineering/computer science, Ph.D. in networking
in 1994, and have been working in the security area ever since. I
don't happen to think that automatically makes me righter than your son,
though. In many ways, that just means I've had more years to become
lost than your son. :)

What I think makes me righter is reports of vulnerabilities by those
people who are dedicated to finding them. Many people are surprised to
discover that most vulnerabilities and exploits are *not* found by
attackers. Rather, they are found by people trying to protect those
systems, and the way they choose to help protect them is to find out
which attacks *could* be used, and to make sure they are patched before
the attack is discovered by others.

In a typical exploit life cycle, the vulnerability is found weeks to
months before the attack is uncovered in the wild. By that time, a
patch has usually been developed and distributed to prevent the attack
from taking effect. In the past, most of the damage has taken place
several months *after* the patch has been available; it is due chiefly
to people not installing those patches. I think the XP automatic
updates have helped enormously (especially as XP is what most people
are running now).

There are many more vulnerabilities found in Microsoft software (often
not the OS, though--very often in things like the IIS) than in the
corresponding Mac and Unix software. Things are definitely improving,
though. Recent software from Microsoft seems pretty good.

> And as he told me. If Mac's were as popular as PC's, they would
> get attacked just as much.
>
> These people are out after an audiance, and PC's give them the biggest
> audiance possible.....

His evidence is...? There is no way to dispute such a claim. And I
never said that this wasn't a factor--just that it wasn't the bulk of
the reason.

> These people could care less about brand names, they are after
> as big a target audiance as possible, and Windows operating
> systems givem them just that !

Script kiddies will attack whatever system the scripts they download
will attack. If they could attack Macs (and if they cared about
smirching the good Mac name), they'd do that too. It's a source of
some cachet.

> And hackers who want $$ go after PC's as that is what financial
> institutions use almost exclusively.

Actually, the most likely attack on a financial institution is sheer
vandalism: a denial of service attack. And that kind of attack is
OS-independent.

I think the second most likely attack is an insider attack. That
kind of attack is also OS-independent.

Brian Tung <brian@xxxxxxx>
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
Unofficial C5+ Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/c5plus/
The PleiadAtlas Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/pleiadatlas/
My Own Personal FAQ (SAA) at http://astro.isi.edu/reference/faq.txt
.

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