[X4U] FW: What's the reason for your misleading CNN piece

[Steven Rogers]

> From: Robert Ameeti <robert at ameeti.net>
>
> At 5:25 PM -0700, 10/23/06, Earle Jones wrote:
>
>> 1.  A good friend of mine is a high-powered senior consultant in the
>> field of computer security.  ...
>
>> True, the old-fashioned hacker wants to make a big splash and might
>> avoid the Mac for that reason.
>
> This statement holds no water. Who is going to make bigger news ...
> the writer of the next big Windows virus OR the writer of the first
> significant Mac OS X virus? My money is on the writer of the first
> real OS X virus.

Indeed - that idea might have had some plausibility 3 or 4 years ago,  
but now it just doesn't make any sense from any angle. The reason why  
there are so many viruses for the PC is that Windows has the same  
convoluted surface at lower levels that you see at the user interface  
level. There are ten ways to do any particular thing, and they look  
like they were all designed by ten independent teams that never met.  
But its not very easy to really prove that, and show in an obvious  
way that it is the reason why virus writing is so effective on the  
PC.  But the thing that's obvious to anyone is that the PC has a lot  
more people writing viruses for it than the Mac - and you just have  
to wonder how anyone could imagine that hacker-fame or user base  
could explain it.

As far as fame goes, why would it be that *no* virus writers are  
interested in the Mac?  You could imagine that far fewer would be  
interested, but that *none* would be interested?  That is just absurd.

And on the hacking-for-dollars side, its even more absurd. There may  
be fewer Macs out there, but that's still *millions* of supposedly  
vulnerable Macs with their clueless drivers surfing the net with  
mostly no anti-virus protection at all, just waiting for anyone to  
come along and gobble up all kinds of bank account and credit card  
info. If its just as easy to write a Mac virus and deploy it, then  
why aren't these hackers-for-profit taking advantage of this vast  
field of virginal users that have no virus savvy at all, and no  
competing viruses?  Oh yeah - its because there are more PCs - yeah,  
that's it.

A lot of people (including me) have argued that the Windows virus  
phenomenon is made possible by the architecture of Windows. Its very  
difficult to make that kind of point in a concise and non-technical  
way that seems like its proven the point and closed the case.  
However, as time moves on, the excuse-making wears thin. There really  
are only two categories of options - a) its something about Windows  
itself that facilitates viruses or b) its a social or market-driven  
phenomena that has nothing to do with Windows technology per-se. As  
time goes by, its harder and harder to imagine that Windows is so  
unique in the hacker culture no virus writer has *ever* found it  
interesting enough to write something real for it. But people just  
keep repeating it as if it made sense.

SR