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Comment by hs | Hacker News Reader

I seriously don't think market share has anything to do with security

if popularity is the main reason, then how come the more popular unix servers, are more secure than their windows-based counterparts?

why unix better? by obscurity? absolutely not (i reiterate unix are more popular, powering huge sites) better knowledge/use strong passwords? nope don't think so better admin? maybe better product? absolutely ... ssh, encription, randomization (swap, memory, etc)

my conclusion: unix is more secure due to its bottom-up iterate-often development model yielding better product (more secure, more powerful, etc)

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Remote login to Windows is encrypted.

SSL and generic encryption primitives are built in to Windows, and the libraries that implement them (schannel, etc) have been audited by people who have, among other things, published RSA breaks.

Microsoft pioneered randomization. OS X just recently attempted to introduce ASLR, as a catch-up measure to Microsoft, and failed badly.

The evidence you've presented is easily refuted, and so your arguments won't carry.

Well the fact they're easily refuted shows how much i use windows in daily bases (almost 0%)

my guess (based on rumors) is that even though ms implements those security measures, she leaves some weaknesses open intentionally (sony rootkit came to mind)

actually i was thinking more about OpenBSD instead of OSX and clump them together as unix

but you haven't refuted my main point: if popularity plays a role THAT much, then why unix servers (more popular, more secure, more powerful, more damaging) are less compromised?

Thanks for being candid.

Well, let's turn that around. In the years from 1995 through 1998, Windows security was black magic both to defenders and attackers --- Win32 attacks didn't really mainstream until Solar Designer and Matt Conover broke the story on how to exploit overflows in the heap.

During the same time period, Unix systems --- and particularly SunOS/Solaris --- were positively riddled with trivially exploitable stack overflows. Number of Solaris worms and viruses during that time period? Zero.

I'm sort of digressing, but, can you come up with a logic that explains why OS X virus scarcity is about the intrinsic security of OS X and still describes the '90s?

I don't think malware prevalance has much to do with intrinsic OS security at all.

Also: smart not to lump OS X in with other Unixes. OS X has a very different, much more difficult challenge to deal with than server Linux.

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