[afnog] FW: Deep study: The world's safest computing environment

[Brian Candler]

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 08:54:04AM +0300, Brian Longwe wrote:
>    London, UK - 2 November 2004, 02:30 GMT - The most comprehensive study
>    ever undertaken by the mi2gIntelligence Unit

Who he?

>    The study also reveals that Linux has become the most breached 24/7
>    online computing environment in terms of manual hacker attacks overall
>    and accounts for 65.64% of all breaches recorded, with 154,846
>    successfully compromised Linux 24/7 online computers of all flavours.

That's not a particularly useful statistic though, given that Linux and
FreeBSD both run mostly the same set of apps, and usually it's the apps
which have the security holes. Part of this is going to reflect that:

* More computers run Linux than FreeBSD

* FreeBSD has fewer services turned on by default than some Linux
distributions (e.g. things like lpd)

* And just maybe, FreeBSD admins are more competent than Linux admins on the
average. I would expect a larger installed based of Linux as a desktop O/S
(Windows-replacement), with a correspondingly lower level of clue.

>    "More and more smart individuals, government agencies and corporations
>    are shifting towards Apple and BSD environments in 2004," according to
>    DK Matai, Executive Chairman, mi2g.

Who he?

>    We enhance comparative advantage within
>    financial services and government agencies.
>    Specifically we seek to secure the interface between stakeholders

Oh OK, that's clear then.

(Just so you know: the machine I'm writing this on runs FreeBSD. So does my
laptop. So do most of the servers I've built. You know where my O/S vote
lies :-)

Regards,

Brian.