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Comment by varjag | Hacker News Reader

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varjag·

The solution of course is to not use Windows, without ifs and buts. It was a bad idea coming to its conclusion.

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That's always the solution, even if it isn't a realistic one.

Plenty of software runs on platforms other than windows. Plenty of industrial control software, too.

And of course once nobody's using Windows, attackers will pivot to target whatever everyone's switched to in its place. And they'll find holes. They always do.

We're talking about the difference between barely usable and unusable here. No system in the world has ever been slimefest of the scale of Windows. Even those which are deployed more than Windows.

It is much to easy to blame Windows for everything. If this is another TRITON level attack then it did not matter what operating system is used, the attackers would have come in anyway. With enough resources you can break anything.

Check out the DEFCON 2018 talk "Through the Eyes of the Attacker" to see to what lengths the TRITON attackers went. These guys were dumping eeproms from boards running obscure MIPS processors and were looking at raw ethernet packets in Wireshark and flipping bits in the packets to see what would happen. That their command&control was running on Windows was just coincidence.

> With enough resources you can break anything.

Very few adversaries have enough resources to break anything. The threshold for roughing up a Windows setup is the lowest in the industry.

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