Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 13th Jun 2006 12:11 UTC, submitted by John McWell
More than 60 percent of compromised Windows PCs scanned by Microsoft's Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool between January 2005 and March 2006 were found to be running malicious bot software, the company said. The tool removed at least one version of the remote-control software from about 3.5 million PCs, it added. That's compared with an overall 5.7 million machines with infections overall. "Backdoor Trojans [...] are a significant and tangible threat to Windows users," Microsoft said in the report. 
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Member since:
2006-02-15
Running a script file on *nix could erase, at worst, your home directory
Unless you're in the sudoer's list on a system with the no-password-required version of sudo,
or you're in a group that has read/write access to sensitive data on the system that's not in your home directory, like, say, a database,
or naively set up root with no password,
or have xhost access to someone's box,
or set up ssh credentials to allow password free log in to sensitive accounts from your account,
or, by dumb luck, happen to be on a system with a privilige escalation exploit possibility.
and it can be argued that the sort of denial-of-service attack such a script could mount might be more harmful than the loss of a user's data.
As someone who spent days cleaning up vaxen/unix boxes after the original internet worm attack, I'm not a big believer in the myth that <your favorite OS> is more secure than <the OS you hate most>.