One striking thing about the infestations was that I was never specifically targeted by the miscreants nowadays, it’s as easy to attack 100,000 computers with a botnet as it is to attack a dozen.
The effects of such malware were always initially subtle, something you wouldn’t even notice, until the malware ended up so deeply embedded in the system that performance started to suffer noticeably. More recently, a widespread automated hack circumvented the security on my website and infected it with malware. Like many of you, I have firsthand experience of the threats that are out there: I have been infected by malware and viruses on numerous Windows computers, and I even had macro viruses that infected files on my Mac. The lone teen hacker that once dominated the public imagination has been supplanted by well-organized networks of criminals and shadowy, government-funded organizations with vast computing resources. Attacks have become far more sophisticated. Still, would it be wise to reconsider? Are the three leading desktop OSes different enough in their approach to security to make a change worthwhile?Ĭertainly the threats confronting enterprise systems have changed in the last few years. Heck, they get enough pushback when they move users to a new version of their OS of choice. Few IT organizations would want the headache of moving a globally dispersed workforce to an entirely new OS.
And once an OS choice is made, it’s hard to consider a change. Go back far enough and all operating systems were reasonably safe, because the business of hacking into them and stealing data or installing malware was in its infancy. One reason enterprises might not have evaluated the security of the OS they deployed to the workforce is that they made the choice years ago. We asked some experts what they think of the security of these three choices: Windows, the ever-more-complex platform that’s easily the most popular desktop system macOS X, the FreeBSD Unix-based operating system that powers Apple Macintosh systems and Linux, by which we mean all the various Linux distributions and related Unix-based systems.
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