I agree with your assessment of why Windows is targeted the most. It has the biggest base of users that don't know squat about security. If Linux penetration were at even 50%, a large enough population of non-security conscious people would be using Linux, too, and it would be targeted.

I was surprised my Linux box was targeted. Between what I perceived as better security and Linux and the relatively low ROI for finding and hacking a Linux box when you could just email a virus/trojan to a million Windows users, I was surprised by the fact that my Linux box was rooted. The root password was such that I'm quite sure it was not guessed. They got in some way that bypassed the need for a password. To this day I don't know how, but it definitely taught me that the relative obscurity and low number of users of Linux is not enough to keep hackers disinterested. It also taught me that Linux isn't all that secure because given the password I was using, some weakness in the OS (or in one of the dozens of free apps that get installed with it by default) let that hacker in password-free.



Excellent book. A friend loaned it to me over a decade ago and just a few weeks ago, on a cold and rainy day when my wife was out of town and I felt like relaxing, I went down to the bookstore and bought myself a copy and read it straight through. A very readable book for a geek. :)

I wish I had a job where someone paid me to track down lowlife hacker scum. These days, though, it's just accepted as the norm and you generally just close the hole and hope they'll move on to some other target rather than tracking them down.



That's my understanding as well. I know that Outlook had problems years ago with auto-displaying attachments and that was a dangerous approach. I avoided all email programs that used the IE-rendering engine like the plague. My understanding is that that problem has long since been fixed. But regardless, that's a problem with the application, not the OS.



Very true. Microsoft might take weeks or even months to respond to a problem, but once they do they auto-patch virtually everyone. Unless you're a full-time geek or in a full-time job that is to maintain your box's integrity, it would normally take most "normal" users far longer than that to recompile their operating system--if they even knew what that meant.

Regards,
Craig Steiner