nightjar nightjar@ wrote:

If you were a black hat looking to do mischief, what would be a bigger
prize.... A big pile of Windows boxes? or eBay, the BBC News site, and
Telehouse in docklands?


I'm not talking about the mischief makers, who are only a small part of the
problem. What I am talking about is the organised attacks by teams of
programmers working for criminals, primarily those distributing porn, that
are aimed at making money from the computer users. The Windows boxes are

I was including all forms of malicious activity in my phrase "do
mischief" - not just the script kiddies out for a good time, but the
organised criminal as well.

both easier to get into and more likely to yield returns, both because the
users are less likely to know how to stop the attacks and because there are
simply so many of them that even duping a very small percentage of them will
bring in lots of money. I don't see any profit for that sector in attacking
servers, high profile sites or the internet itself.

For a good proportion of attacks I think you are right. Some like
premium rate phone scams only work on the small scale. Others like
identity theft obviously work well enough on the small scale, even if
the stolen identity itself then goes on to fry much bigger fish in the
real world. However for the larger organised crime (or even terrorist)
bodies, I can also see big value in the larger scale targets. If
extortion is your game, it is going to be far more effective if you can
interfere with the infrastructure directly (even if you proxy through a
pile of zombies to cover your tracks!) As I mentioned in another part of
the thread, imagine the mileage in being able to completely isolate a
site on the web, or steal/redirect all it's traffic, or wipe out (or
just tap) a large part of a multinationals VoIP calls.

In many respects this is probably an academic discussion, since even if
an alternative OS made big inroads into Windows' market share on the
desktop, it is unlikely to result in the same monoculture that would
allow like for like comparisons to be made.


--
Cheers,

John.

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