Head in the sand?
Hackers will attack solely based on the number of users of an OS.
Any OS is crackable. The widespread deployment is the ONLY reason Microsoft products are repeatedly attacked. Open Source will just give them some more keys.
Wrong
Funny. False on its face.
The Witty Worm(The above posted by Freeper Zeugma, April 4, 2005)Witty infected only about a tenth as many hosts than the next smallest widespread Internet worm. Where SQL Slammer infected between 75,000 and 100,000 computers, the vulnerable population of the Witty worm was only about 12,000 computers. Although researchers have long predicted that a fast-probing worm could infect a small population very quickly, Witty is the first worm to demonstrate this capability. While Witty took 30 minutes longer than SQL Slammer to infect its vulnerable population, both worms spread far faster than human intervention could stop them. In the past, users of software that is not ubiquitously deployed have considered themselves relatively safe from most network-based pathogens. Witty demonstrates that a remotely accessible bug in any minimally popular piece of software can be successfully exploited by an automated attack.I suspect there are more than 12,000 Linux and/or Mac hosts out there on the internet.
Also, consider that the folks who were hit with this were also among the more security-concious users:
The vulnerable host population pool for the Witty worm was quite different from that of previous virulent worms. Previous worms have lagged several weeks behind publication of details about the remote-exploit bug, and large portions of the victim populations appeared to not know what software was running on their machines, let alone take steps to make sure that software was up to date with security patches. In contrast, the Witty worm infected a population of hosts that were proactive about security -- they were running firewall software. The Witty worm also started to spread the day after information about the exploit and the software upgrades to fix the bug were available.
In addition, viruses have been written for a specific Ethernet router with fewer than 40,000 installed base and cell phones with fewer than 100,000. There are over 18,000,000 OSX Macs (Newsweek cited 25,000,000 based on a scientific poll of computer users), are seriousy thinking that is not a sufficient installed base to attract hackers?