Viruses and Market Dominance - Myth or Fact?

rocketjam writes "An article at The Register, authored by Scott Granneman of SecurityFocus, examines the conventional wisdom that if Linux or Mac OS X were as popular as Windows, there would be just as many viruses written for those platforms. Mr. Granneman bluntly says this is wrong, then proceeds to detail the fundamental differences between those OS's and Windows which make Windows an easy and inviting target for virus-writers, as opposed to the Unix-based platforms."

Re:meh

[Anonymous Coward]

by Anonymous Coward on 05:25 PM October 6th, 2003 (#7148096)
Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one.

And they all stink.

I see the problem.

[Soulfader]

"Check out this wicked screensaver!!!! But it um, only runs as root, so you have to su first. Also, chmod and make it executable, please. Thanks!"

Re:What about r00tkits?

[SquadBoy]

Who is to say that r00tkits are not? Maybe they are the really smart ones just using the kiddies as hosts. Every think of that smarty smarty go to a party?

Re:Let's Keep the Party Going

[TooTechy]

Please. Let's just remove this comment.

Architecture

[deputydink]

One of the things that makes Linux a poor target for virus writers is an almost bewildering array of platforms, kernels and architectures.
System binaries are often in different places even on the same distribution, depending on whether you are using package management or compiling source and sometimes run as different users.

I've seen about 5 diffenent schemes for laying out apache on the disk and i bet theres tonnes more. and i've seen some old solaris admins that move to linux feel the need to move important binaries into /etc.

there are alot of reasons why linux has less viruses than windows and none of them have to do with marketshare or bad admins. That being said, i wonder if it couldn't hurt to fuck with your filesystems just in case i'm wrong...

Differences...

[SharpFang]

Windows "out of the box" is as wide open as the goatse.cx guy. Linux by default usually has some tiny backdoors (say, unpassworded LILO) and is generally hard to break into. Now assume, breaking into the system using self-sustaining program (like virus - you deploy and it proceeds on its own, without "external help") is quite a bit harder than breaking in "manually" (i.e. trying diferent exploits, snooping, spoofing etc). If Linux is so much harder to break in manually, it's just as much harder to spread viruses.
Plus the "flavour" factor. If there were as many as different "windows distributions" and windows was as customizable as Linux, the viruses would have much harder time to find "exploitable system".
Now, when we are past the political differences, we may consider how "technically" harder is it to write Linux viruses.

Re:Windows viruses and GNU/Linux

[realdpk]

Of course! I'm certain that once Linux is more popular than Windows, all of the people who used to code for Windows will simultaneously implode, preventing them from writing bad code on Linux.

Re:Unix-based ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux uses all of the old UNIX concepts of fork(),

Actually linus implemented clone() instead. Please learn.

Re:Unix-based ...

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

As a Linux user, I am proud that Linux is a UNIX derived (at least in spirit) system. It has a base of history, knowledge and experience from which to build. Would starting purely from scratch be better? I hardly think so.

Now if you could remit to SCO $699.00 we would appreciate it.... Darl McBride

Reminds me of

[Anonymous Coward]

The good old (INSERT ETHNIC GROUP HERE) virus:

This is the (IEGH) virus. As we have no programming skills, this relies on the honor system. Please forward to 10 of your contacts, and then format your harddrive.

Re:Windows viruses and GNU/Linux

[flossie]

That same programmer, once Windows is dead and buried, will still be around writing code

Yeah, but it probably won't be free code, and as we Linux users are all to cheap to pay for software, we should all be ok! :o)

MS Windows, Viruses, Worms, all the same

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say that MS Windows, Viruses, Worms all fall into the same category... after all dont they all pose dangers?

BeOS

[Anonymous Coward]

HA HA HA, BeOS has no viruses written for it. But on the other hand it has no other applications written for it either.

Re:Ease-of-use ~ Ease-of-infection

[Anonymous Coward]

My front door is safer because it is an airlock requiring a physical key, a blood sample, urinalysis, and voice match before it lets me open it.