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Spam Guy wrote:
> 
> These exploits fall over when they hit a win-98 system.  They're trying
> to attach themselves to services or perform calls that only work on
> NT-based systems (2k, xp, etc).
> 
> It's quite funny to watch in action.  
> 
> Win-9x/me was always inherently more secure (from these sorts of
> web-based exploits) than the NT line was.  Whether that was because of
> design simplicity, or just dumb luck, I don't know. 
> 
> What I do know is that foisting XP onto the home/soho market back in
> late 2001 as a replacement to win-ME was a really really bad idea.  XP
> (and it's successors) is an unnecessarily complicated and over-designed
> and over-managed OS for the home and soho market.  XP was an incredibly
> vulnerable during the first 4 or 5 years of it's life.  It's the reason
> why the spam and botnet phenomena became commercially viable.
> 
> Look at the what - 5 or 6 different network worms that have been
> discovered over the past 10 years.  You connect a win-2k or XP system to
> the net and do nothing and within 30 minutes your system is hacked (look
> up "Internet Survival Time").
> 
> Do the same with a win-98 system (right out of the box, no updates or
> patches applied) and guess what - nothing happens.

Peace.

Win98 was good in many simple ways such as those you suggest. If I 
remember M$ was just trying to improve on Win95 and convince users to 
shell out more $ for more features. I was in a WIn95 world at $dayjob at 
that time and the consensus was not to upgrade. We stuck with NT except 
for Win95 on desktop and laptops.

XP was the break to 'greater security.' :-( if I remember. The first 
versions had the cutesy factors but some major problems with security. 
So many exploits, so little time.

Fast forward to now, we've seen growth of botnets as you say. How much 
of this was not just the Win OS but also the plague of 'IE security'?

My choice in recent years having seen the 'new' M$ offerings in Vista 
and the Office 2007 debacle, to try linux as a parallel environment. It 
has many pluses and one of which is the price and then the ability to 
upgrade some of my old hardware which would have otherwise had gone to 
the recycling center.

For some of the rogue site work, the native unix commands are pretty 
handy. Not having a unix neckbeard, I'm a newbie in this, but a little 
knowledge sometimes is a dangerous thing.

Anyway, to each his (or her) own.

Thane