[Ilugc] Misleading article in Ziff-Davis eWeek
- From: siva@xxxxxxxxxxx (Sivasankar Chander)
- Date: Wed Nov 3 14:03:27 2004
Sivasankar Chander wrote:
> There's a misleading article in today's Ziff-Davis eWeek, titled
> "Mac and Linux Not Immune to Viruses".
>
> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1706263,00.asp
More misleading text at http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/021104.php
claiming to be "intelligent", and as dubious as its source !
OK, I now understand the significance of both articles - they're
definitely FUD commissioned by Micros~1, and here's why:
The first article pretends to be talking about viruses (it's in the
title), but actually talks about social-engineering and phishing in the
text of the article - concluding that all platforms are equally vulnerable
to social engineering and phishing.
The second article pretends to be talking about security, but neatly
sidesteps the issue of malware (spyware, adware, viruses, trojans, ...) until
the concluding paragraph.
The only metric they're measuring is a break-in, and it's not even clear
how they define it. Their definition of 'security through obscurity' is
fallacious, and they're not even considering the severity of the intrusion
(in reality, a non-root shell intrusion into a Linux system, say as 'guest'
or 'nobody', is very common, but has negligible severity).
They're also clubbing home users, soho users, big enterprise servers, etc.
together without any differentiation. It is entirely possible for a newbie
home Linux install to have no firewall and all TCP services turned on.
On this basis, they conclude that Linux is the most vulnerable to break-ins!
(Maybe - but what exactly is a break-in? IMHO, a login into a guest account
should not count, but a remote root exploit should count - there's no clarity
on this subject in the article).
As they say, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. To this, we may add
an entirely new category, which is FUD from Redmond.
-Siva
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