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Comment by diminish | Hacker News Reader

Now, what has to be done not to get hacked ends up being answered as; AVs won't help, macs won't help, linux won't help, and use ipad? are we heading towards a world where average users will end up in managed computing behind walls, and only some hackers and crackers will use open computing? is computing doomed to be a the black and white world of tyrannic rule vs. mob rule?

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> linux won't help

? He says Linux does help.

but he says, only because it is not much common, and different distros are too diverse to justify an "investment"

Yes, the reasons are not very impressive ones, but nonetheless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

I don't see the relevance. Linux is no good target, because there are not many linux boxes compared to windows/mac and because 100 linux boxes might require 10 different ways to attack them, while 100 windows boxes might require 1 or 2. There is nothing obscure here, just diversity.

Diversity is always a good tacit in defeating pest. Learn from nature / biology. Monocultures are unstable and have to be superficially stabilized with great effort.

similarly the guy says, he creates variations of the code in order to avoid detection. a world where hunter and the hunt all diversify.

Surely Linux would be a good target? There are hundreds of thousands of Linux servers out there and they will have a lot of bandwidth / CPU etc.

But how do you get the malware on the servers? Most malware spread by tricking unsophisticated users into install them. It is much harder to trick a system administrator to so. Exploiting a vulnerable public facing service is the alternative. However, that option is out of reach to all but the most dedicated attackers, assuming you keep the system updated.

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