windows vista, windows xp, or linux

[eeyrjmr]

Linux has nothing to worry about for the moment since it's still too unpopular to be a viable target, but you can be damn sure that if it ever reaches anything near Windows' current market share, there will be a shit-ton of viruses for it..

Lulz
what do you think the web runs on... Go check out netcraft for a moment and see the number of 24/7 webfacing servers there are
Then go learn about true mult-user operating system with ACL and THEN you will realised that Linux is not as susceptible to virus's as OSX/Windows
Yes a virus can be written (shite I can knock together a bashscript that can do some damage) BUT 1) user must explicitly run it 2) bitch to spread
Only way "Linux" would go pearshaped w.r.t. virus's if some asshat proprietory devhouse knocked out shite (I mean OSX built on BSD and they have made a joke of BSD's security) BUT even still alot more of the core of linux is open for many eyes to provent that. EVEN then run a hardened toolchain system and nothing is getting in, even a vuln in a closed-source app would get terminated by the kernel and the userland the moment it did something outside its sandbox that everything is wrapped in

--edit-- just incase you don't know what "hardened" is
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/hardened-toolchain.xml
this is out of date (gcc-4.3.1 is hardened now)

 

[Mithent]

Hey genius, guess what? Windows Vienna uses the EXACT SAME base as Vista. Same driver model, same network stack, same security features, everything. It's an incremental upgrade to Vista, which is why MS is able to push it out so quickly.

Indeed. It does amuse me when people say "Vista sucks! Wait for Windows 7, that will be great!" when there are few, if any, fundamental changes between the two. As the Mojave experiment showed, the fact that it's not called "Vista" may well mean it does better - there's just so much negative spin on that name for some reason.

what do you think the web runs on... Go check out netcraft for a moment and see the number of 24/7 webfacing servers there are
Then go learn about true mult-user operating system with ACL and THEN you will realised that Linux is not as susceptible to virus's as OSX/Windows

As you point out, these are web servers, and can be pretty well locked-down and hardened against attacks, but I'm not sure if it's entirely fair to compare them to desktop OSes where the system is vulnerable to attacks from many other vectors. Most malware enters systems because the user runs it or the user accesses websites exploiting browser flaws, not through anything in the core OS (when that does happen, it's big news, but hasn't occurred significantly since Sasser, prior to XP SP2).

That's not to say that desktop Linux isn't harder to infect than Windows, but one of the main reasons for this is that normal users don't run with elevated privileges - something that Microsoft has introduced to Vista with UAC, albeit necessarily imperfectly due to badly-behaved programs assuming you have local admin rights. Unfortunately, people then turn this security feature off.

 

[Zero82z]

Lulz
what do you think the web runs on... Go check out netcraft for a moment and see the number of 24/7 webfacing servers there are
Then go learn about true mult-user operating system with ACL and THEN you will realised that Linux is not as susceptible to virus's as OSX/Windows
Yes a virus can be written (shite I can knock together a bashscript that can do some damage) BUT 1) user must explicitly run it 2) bitch to spread
Only way "Linux" would go pearshaped w.r.t. virus's if some asshat proprietory devhouse knocked out shite (I mean OSX built on BSD and they have made a joke of BSD's security) BUT even still alot more of the core of linux is open for many eyes to provent that. EVEN then run a hardened toolchain system and nothing is getting in, even a vuln in a closed-source app would get terminated by the kernel and the userland the moment it did something outside its sandbox that everything is wrapped in

--edit-- just incase you don't know what "hardened" is
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/hardened-toolchain.xml
this is out of date (gcc-4.3.1 is hardened now)

We're talking consumer OSes here, not server-grade. If you're comparing Linux to Windows you have to use a distro like Ubuntu, Fedora, or Linspire, otherwise it doesn't make much sense. You can lock Windows down pretty hard as well (although given, not as much as Linux), but it wouldn't be too great as a day-to-day OS if you did.

 

[devman]

Indeed. It does amuse me when people say "Vista sucks! Wait for Windows 7, that will be great!" when there are few, if any, fundamental changes between the two. As the Mojave experiment showed, the fact that it's not called "Vista" may well mean it does better - there's just so much negative spin on that name for some reason.



As you point out, these are web servers, and can be pretty well locked-down and hardened against attacks, but I'm not sure if it's entirely fair to compare them to desktop OSes where the system is vulnerable to attacks from many other vectors. Most malware enters systems because the user runs it or the user accesses websites exploiting browser flaws, not through anything in the core OS (when that does happen, it's big news, but hasn't occurred significantly since Sasser, prior to XP SP2).

That's not to say that desktop Linux isn't harder to infect than Windows, but one of the main reasons for this is that normal users don't run with elevated privileges - something that Microsoft has introduced to Vista with UAC, albeit necessarily imperfectly due to badly-behaved programs assuming you have local admin rights. Unfortunately, people then turn this security feature off.

Also worth mentioning a lot of damage to a desktop system can be done in user-land (i.e. wiping or swiping personal files/info) which would not trigger a elevation challenge (UAC, sudo, etc). In a server environment compromising one process is usually contained by the user that owns it (assuming the OS security does its job) such as having an apache user specifically for running httpd, but in a desktop environment the operating user usually has unfettered access to everything he wants works with.