Replies

Re: “...just a bit of common sense about what sites and places I visit and which links I click on in emails.”

I've used Windows for 20 years.

If the author used Windows, and if the author followed his own advice, he would have had almost no problems with Windows, either.

I've had 4 viruses in 20 years. Two of them after opening or downloading Adobe documents.

I currently have a virus that attacks and shuts down my McAfee firewall and gives me a pop-up that wants me to download a software program.

I've done a half dozen full computer scans, and I have no idea where this thing is hiding, or where it came from.

Intel has purchased McAfee, and a few weeks ago they shut down the McAfee Help Desk and the User Chat Room, so I don't even know how to alert McAfee to the problem.

There are many posts on Google about this pop-up, and many very complicated suggestions about how to stop it, but there is no way to verify these solutions, so I have not tried any of them.

So, obviously, Windows is not perfect, but 4 viruses in 20 years, for the most widely used desktop OS in the world, is not a bad record, either.

I have about the same experience on windows as zeestephen, about 2 or 3 viri over the decades. One was when I was phished years ago before the term was popular. Another was stupid Adobe acrobat like zee.

The author of the article doesn't have very much information on Windows security and definitely misses the main point. Which is that Windows relied on security through obscurity and MS has slowly added access control. In contrast Mac and Unix started with nearly complete access control. The main point is that defenses like least privilege and access control are open and relatively simple and meant to be scrutinized. The result is very few privilege escalations on MacOS. We talked about one in a thread once. It was a genuine threat, but easy to patch. So easy, I figured out how to patch it myself. Try that on Windows.

Another Windows problem: for performance reasons Windows had graphics code in the kernel and paths from external input to that code. Enough stupid stuff like that makes for a robust supply of potential vulnerabilities.