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JohnB
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Post by JohnB »

With Germany stating to give up on IE as a security risk I had some questions relating to the article.

Microsoft claims that the reason IE has the most vulnerbilities is because it's the most popular not because there is inherently wrong with IE per se. They argue, if firefox became the most popular people would start finding vulnerbilities in it and exploit them. Do you agree with this? People often say that with linux there is very low market penetration so people don't bother writing viruses for it though it is very simple.

Another thing, if software is closed source does that make it generally more secure than open source software? If you have the source code available does this make it easier to find vulnerbilites than closed source?
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3XTORTION
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Post by 3XTORTION »

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

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Post by bad_brain »

lame excuse from MS imo. if you only count the latest versions (IE8 and FF3) the browers are almost on the same level:
1 Internet Explorer 8.0 22.43%
2 Firefox 3.5 22.18%
3 Internet Explorer 7.0 16.43%
4 Internet Explorer 6.0 11.44%
5 Firefox 3.0 8.58%
ok, if you count all IE versions together IE of course more used than FF, but this is still no valid reason for the amount of flaws in IE, because the reasons why the german BSI ("federal office for IT security") labeled IE insecure is not just because of new zero days, some flaws exist since almost a year already and MS seems not to be able to fix them. also the zero days apply to ALL versions of IE, this shows MS was not able to increase the security compared to older version and made the same mistakes over and over again.
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Re: Security

Post by lilrofl »

JohnB wrote:if software is closed source does that make it generally more secure than open source software? If you have the source code available does this make it easier to find vulnerbilites than closed source?
Not really, like icedane said, if you have a bunch of people looking at the same code, bugs will be found, and fixed faster then if no one but the guy who wrote it is looking.

As for virus on Linux... if it doesn't have the permissions to replicate, it's pretty much not replicating me thinks.
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Lyecdevf
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Post by Lyecdevf »

A virus needs administrator rights to do any thing on your computer and under linux administrator rights are given specifically to a certain task that you are doing. Most people who use windows surf the net with administrator rights. Besides that most applications are written for a specific kernel version and linux distribution but on windows an exe is going to work on any platform if you ask me. I have heard of a 13 year old virus infect a vista box. On the other hand writing a virus for linux would require a constant effort on the side of the virus writer to keep up with new kernel versions, releases,...it would be just insane...
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Post by IceDane »

Lyecdevf wrote:A virus needs administrator rights to do any thing on your computer and under linux administrator rights are given specifically to a certain task that you are doing. Most people who use windows surf the net with administrator rights. Besides that most applications are written for a specific kernel version and linux distribution but on windows an exe is going to work on any platform if you ask me. I have heard of a 13 year old virus infect a vista box. On the other hand writing a virus for linux would require a constant effort on the side of the virus writer to keep up with new kernel versions, releases,...it would be just insane...
Binaries on Linux do, in almost all cases, work on other linux systems as well.

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