You've probably heard of the recent Flashback infections on Apple Macintoshes. It makes you see the old Mac v/s PC video in new light.
There's an interesting back of the envelope calculation which predicts the market-share "f" at which writing malware for Macs would become "profitable". If you assume that the non-Mac world is all PC, and that the success-rate of an attach is "s" (due to anti-virus protection), then you end up with, f = (1-f)s as the attackers utility equation, which yields f = s/(1+s). Plug in "s=0.2", which is a typical success rate, you get f = 0.16, compared to the current 11% market-share.
Nothing is unbreakable! Not Oracle, not Macs, not Linux!
There's an interesting back of the envelope calculation which predicts the market-share "f" at which writing malware for Macs would become "profitable". If you assume that the non-Mac world is all PC, and that the success-rate of an attach is "s" (due to anti-virus protection), then you end up with, f = (1-f)s as the attackers utility equation, which yields f = s/(1+s). Plug in "s=0.2", which is a typical success rate, you get f = 0.16, compared to the current 11% market-share.
Nothing is unbreakable! Not Oracle, not Macs, not Linux!
No comments:
Post a Comment