Researchers at security firm Finjan have uncovered a massive botnet of Windows machines. The botnet is 1.9 million machines strong, with many of the machines located in the United States: 45% of them are located in the US. The researchers detailed their findings at the RSA Conference in San Fransisco.
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Member since:2006-09-22
Member since:2007-07-12
"And the fact that Windows has a marketshare of more than 90%. Even for specialized media, Windows is the computer."
Marketshare has nothing to do with it and Windows is NOT the computer, it's an OS, and one of the most unsecure on the planet in an out of the box install, at least on XP and earlier. Most home users are running as root which makes turning their machines into bots very easy.
Windows is attacked beecause it is EASY to attack and yes, it is a large target also, but the primary reason is it is easy to attack. The statistics doesn't work for marketshare if you use Apache as an example: Apache is the most widely used web server on the market but IIS gets attacked more, or rather successfully attacked more. Why? Because IIS is not as secure as Apache.
It's too bad back in the day Microsoft created an OS that was easy to use but with no thought whatsoever in terms of security. If they had thought about it, they would have started educating users on the proper way to run a computer: the Unix way, not one user as root. It's sad, really, that a company so large has so many problems they have created themselves.
Member since:
2005-07-18
Whatever the mechanism, one has to wonder if they are clever enough to do the crime, they may well be clever enough to leave misleading information laying around for researchers to glom onto.