Posted on 01/07/2007 6:56:27 PM PST by Huntress
UPI, AP, and the MSM is part of the sheep control system, and if the sheep happened to look up, they might rebel and stop paying their taxes and watching the MSM for instructions on what to do...
Oh, no doubt, I'm not letting Microsoft off the hook for that. Sure, there's a lot of legacy stuff to support, but Apple has managed to change processor architectures twice and move to a completely rewritten OS with a pretty smooth transition each time.
This should worry anyone who knows anything about security. Sure enough, the early versions of Vista fell to the Land attack which has source IP == destination IP. This vulnerability first appeared in Windows 95 over ten years ago.
Sounds like the Vista developers really put at lot of thought into their new TCP/IP stack. Of course, the "thought" was on how to incorporate DRM at the packet level rather than security
Well, if they provided any details, people would realize that this article could have been written in the 1980s or 1990s! Anybody remember Michaelangelo?
Mark
Sorry, but this is FUD. If the mechanisms were out there, it wouldn't take long at all to propagate a worm or virus across the millions of Macs and Linux boxes out there.
From a previous post of mine:
Yeah, that is something the Microsoft bashers don't realize. If 90% of us used Linux or Apples, then 90% of the viruses and spyware would be made for those systems.
What most Microsoft defenders don't realize is that the above is complete and total hogwash.
Firefox now has 10% of browser market share. While 10% may not sound like much it represents a huge number of users when you consider the total number of folks on the net. That also doesn't take into consideration that many people fake their browser responses to make it seem as though they are using IE so stupid websites that require IE for no legitimate reason will work.
Let's take one case in point to show how bogus the concept of "too few users to matter" really is. There are people out there who will write viruses to muck things up just because they can.
From the friendly article:
On Friday March 19, 2004 at approximately 8:45pm PST, an Internet worm began to spread, targeting a buffer overflow vulnerability in several Internet Security Systems (ISS) products, including ISS RealSecure Network, RealSecure Server Sensor, RealSecure Desktop, and BlackICE. The worm takes advantage of a security flaw in these firewall applications that was discovered earlier this month by eEye Digital Security. Once the Witty worm infects a computer, it deletes a randomly chosen section of the hard drive, over time rendering the machine unusable. The worm's payload contained the phrase "(^.^) insert witty message here (^.^)" so it came to be known as the Witty worm.
...
Witty infected only about a tenth as many hosts than the next smallest widespread Internet worm. Where SQL Slammer infected between 75,000 and 100,000 computers, the vulnerable population of the Witty worm was only about 12,000 computers.
Note in the above that the entire population of vulnerable computers was just 12,000, an insignificant number of hosts when you consider how many devices are on the internet.
The Victims:
The vulnerable host population pool for the Witty worm was quite different from that of previous virulent worms. Previous worms have lagged several weeks behind publication of details about the remote-exploit bug, and large portions of the victim populations appeared to not know what software was running on their machines, let alone take steps to make sure that software was up to date with security patches. In contrast, the Witty worm infected a population of hosts that were proactive about security -- they were running firewall software. The Witty worm also started to spread the day after information about the exploit and the software upgrades to fix the bug were available.
O.k., so you have a small pool of vulnerable hosts, and the users at least have the presense of mind to be running a firewall, yet someone took the time to craft and deploy this worm.
Are you sure you still want to claim that there just aren't enough Linux or OSX users out there to make it a tempting target?
That's not even taking psychology into account. There are groups out there who do this kind of thing for fun (and sometimes profit). The bragging rights to having created the first successful OSX worm should be tempting enough if it were as easy a target as MS-Windows apparently is.
"Berkley Linux"
No such animal. There is a Berkeley variant of UNIX. BSD.
This is absolutely true. The Strategy Pages discusses this occasionally; Zombies are worth about $50/month, each. Various criminal groups, esp. in Eastern Europe, run huge nets of these things and fight for control of machines.
"It turned out Microsoft had purchased the right to use the Berkley Linux code in Windows."
Actually MSFT's UNIX variant was XENIX in cahoots with the original Santa Cruz Operation and it was either System Five of Seven variant.
BSD was a love child of Bekeley students/profs and they went in material numbers to create Solaris.
Macs generally have a lifespan longer than PCs. As was said, the last number we know is 19 million on OS X, and over six million have been sold since then. That makes the 25 million number easy, although it could be a bit less as people are replacing their PPC OS X boxes with the Intel Macs. You forget that Apple is winning a lot of converts though. At one point their iMac was the best selling PC in the industry, and now their laptops have a 12% marketshare (ahead of Acer, Toshiba and Lenovo, behind only Dell and HP).
Apples represent a tiny fraction of the PCs sold throughout the world.
A tiny fraction of a really big number results in a big number.
People have written code to attack apples so we know it can be done.
Exploits exist in every OS. The problem is in getting the exploits successful in the wild. That was easy for the old MacOS, which was technologically inferior to even Windows 98. Not so easy for the BSD-based OS X.
Also look for viruses for BSD flavors in the wild, extremely rare. The ones I know of are very old, as in pre-OS X.
I dont know if I would call 13 years 'Decades' ;)
Almost nothing about your post is correct, one does not have to purchase the rights to use BSD *unix* code its implied in the BSD license you can use it any way you want gratis and without the requirement to return code..
Well they should be afraid to 'fix them' there are major liabality issues...
Ummm....give me ONE example of a Linux or Macintosh computer acting as a "zombie" in this scheme... just one... please.
Actually they created SunOS from BSD, Solaris is System5...
Do the Math. One Million Macs per quarter cumulative for six years (24 quarters) plus all the candy G3 iMacs and Mac G3s and G4s that were converted to OS X? That could easily reach 25 million OS X Macs. I think with attrition, though, the number is probably closer to 22 million.
People have written code to attack apples so we know it can be done.
Of course people have written code to attack Apples... but then could they get it to spread; did they find a vector other than psychological persuasion (Trojan Horse)? Not so far.
Program 9 from WindowsXP!!!!!!!!
(or is that "ServicPack II: The Vista Strikes Back")
"Do the Math. One Million Macs per quarter cumulative for six years (24 quarters) plus all the candy G3 iMacs and Mac G3s and G4s that were converted to OS X? That could easily reach 25 million OS X Macs. I think with attrition, though, the number is probably closer to 22 million."
3 million in attrition over 6 years? Not likely
"Of course people have written code to attack Apples... but then could they get it to spread; did they find a vector other than psychological persuasion (Trojan Horse)? Not so far"
The link I posted had one case of 12,000 bad apples in 45 minutes.
"I dont know if I would call 13 years 'Decades' ;)"
Thats apple years. Ya know kinda like dog years but more trendy.
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