Security pro: Windows easier to 0wn

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Thanks

Thank you for explaining the table, even after re-reading
the article I would never have worked it out.

I can't assess whether the particular metric is reasonable or
not, but given that only one exploit has been created for OS
X I find it unbelievable that if 3 Macs were found in about 3
hours, it took 3 days to find 4 vulnerable Windows boxes -
MSBlast infected millions Windows of computers within a
few days.

A number of theoretical exploits have been reported for OS
X, but none ever malliciously exploited and certainly
nothing along the lines of MSBlast or the various e-mail
attachment trojans/worms/etc.

I can only presume that Immunity were looking for boxes
not patched for certain vulnerabilities - a somewhat
esoteric measure of little real world value (typical of
boffins). How do you judge when many exploits are
theoretical and never exploited, even for Windows?

My measure of vulnerability would be a combintion of the
time it takes an expert to hack a stock system,
a measure of exploitable boxes on the net as a percentage
of the total population and how many actual exploits are in
the wild that can attack the exploitable systems.

The results would then help to diagnose the corrective
actoin - e.g. OS X may score pooly because of the
percentage of unpatched systems, highly becaue there
aren't any mallicious hacks around and medium on the time
to hack because ... well ... that's my guess.

Ranking the number of exploitable boxes by exploit would
help to show which updates need to be applied urgently.
These figures are useful for all OSs.

Posted by: Fred Fredrickson   Posted on: 08/16/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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