Interesting take on Linux Desktop market share. includes nice graphs when you click appropriate link

Next, it doesn't matter about market share. The problem exists in the insecure kernel that Microsoft went with at the inception of their first OS. They did and still do have a system 5 kernel that they could have gone with originally. Time and money was the outcome of the current OSes we all enjoy so much.
60% of Servers run linux. Why are these servers not infected with trojans and worms while running on Linux / other system 5 operating systems?
Your line of thinking should show that running linux as a service is dangerous since DNS, Web, Social Networks, Clusters, Clouds mostly use system 5 technology as opposed to Microsoft products.
Microsoft Office environment. Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, SBS Servers.
Any IT man worth his salt hides these behind a Firewall. Smart. And they know why.
Stop thinking that, just because windows is the market share for desktops that is the market share that makes the viruses so prevalent on Windows.
Getting rootkits on major servers and clusters is far more lucrative.

Nick

Second, without a link to the Ballmer slide, I'm not going to comment on the veracity of your (or his) claim. Pics or GTFO, as they say

This is usually done through either poor configuration practice (a server with username "admin" and password "admin", for example) or a previously-patched hole in the server software. It's nothing to do with the underlying OS.

I recommend you read Google's post about it from a couple of years ago (http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/06/...

Please windows fanbois, go defend something that is worth defending. Microsoft uses and abuses you, and costs the world economy tens of billions of dollars year in direct and collateral damage.

What might interest you even more is the fact that the FBI has spyware on people's computers. If the FBI can inject spyware on to a windows computer, and software people allow them the back doors, ie Microsoft, then it is not going to stop hackers from planting spyware either.

Some spyware removal software is programmed to not see the stuff that the FBI has put onto a computer. So these programs will not detect the FBI spyware. Also the way that they got the spyware on the computer in the first place and be used by hackers to allow them access.

Yes the FBI is tracking you the say way that hackers track you. The reason Windows is a problem is because the FBI has a hand in what is patched and what is not. You can't patch something that the FBI uses. Do a google search for CIPAV and you will see what I'm talking about.

Thank you Microsoft.

Apache is open source and has about 60% marketshare. So…. why not more exploits/virui to attack it compared tot he vast number available against IIS?

Members of the Administrator group can do all the things you need to admin a machine, but everything that is potentially a security issue (like, say, installing something which runs at startup) gets run through User Account Control – ie, it says "are you sure you want to do this?" and makes you put in your password. In that sense, it's more like a default user in Linux, where you have to put in your admin password before it will let you do something stupid

There's two caveats to that. First of all, there *is* a super-admin account (the exact equivalent of root) where you won't get bothered by UAC. It's disabled by default though. The second caveat is that in some (but not all) cases where a user has upgraded to Vista from Windows XP, they retain all the privs they have before – which means they have the same control as they used to have, including not being bothered by UAC.

It's worth reading the Wikipedia entry on security features in Windows Vista (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_... – it's a good summary, and there's some very nice stuff in there that Linux should adopt too.

You're right to highlight the differences between the Linux security model and that of Windows XP and prior. But Microsoft changed the game a lot with Vista, and did a lot of work both to make the OS itself more secure and to improve its software methodologies to minimise the potential for security holes. Vista – and Win7 – can make a good claim to be the most secure desktop operating system at present.

BUT… and it's a big "but"… they aren't the *safest* operating systems, because they are the biggest target for malware writers.

There's an old principle in open source development that the sheer number of eyeballs checking open source code makes it more likely that bugs will be found and squashed. Windows, unfortunately, suffers from the same principle with malware: with thousands of malware writers around the world looking for new ways to exploit Windows, more problems will be found no matter what Microsoft does.

And, with 90% of the desktop market, it's the most attractive target for the kind of commercial malware which harvests passwords, relays spam, and launches DDOS attacks.

Hence, while Windows is pretty secure these days, it remains "unsafe" – and until it loses significant market share, it will remain so.

However I totally agree: Linux, by design is a way much more secure system. Windows could be too, if the user would not be automatically be given root access.