kurttrail wrote:

Alun Jones [MS MVP] wrote:

In article , Tim Slattery
wrote:
MS currently sells XP Home, XP Pro and Server 2003. I'm not sure
whether they are currently selling Win2000 (but I don't think so).
That's far fewer than 20 operating systems. A global attack on any
MS system will affect *many, many* computers. How many has Blaster
hit? No, it won't affect DOS, but how many computers use DOS
anymore?

And yet, and yet, and yet... How big of an effect has Blaster had on
the
world? Sure it's caused some significant expenditure on cleanup, but
for
the most part, trains have continued to run, airplanes are still
flying,
life-support monitors are still running, but Jim down the road can't
get
Solitaire to work, because his machine's too busy sending worm-seed
through
his ADSL line.

A focussed, terrorist attack on Windows would need to be orders of
magnitude
more successful in order to merit anything more than "oh, great,
another
dateless zit-pocked teenager has found out how to run a root kit".

Alun.

I agree, but that doesn't mean that there won't be a zero-day bug
sometime soon. That day will be a horrible mess, the day that patch &
computer nasty is released in the same day.

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5180482.html

2 days between patch release and the nasties release. It was a lucky thing
that it wasn't a MS hole. If you haven't noticed, things are speeding up
and a Zero-day bug is just a few years down the bend, if we're lucky. The
mono-culture of the Microsoft desktop is just too big a target to be missed,
eventually someone is gonna hit the bulls-eye. So we, as a society that
security-conscious at present, can do one of two things, find ways to break
up the mono-culture to distribute the threat amongst may targets, or bunker
up at the MicroAlamo, and wait to be overrun.

--
Peace!
Kurt
Self-anointed Moderator
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http://microscum.com
"Trustworthy Computing" is only another example of an Oxymoron!
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