DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This isn’t news to anybody who has been paying attention, but still eye-opening to have proof:

The Honeynet Project released a report saying that Linux is not being hacked. Test systems have an average life expectancy — time before they are successfully hacked — of three months. This is much greater than that of Windows systems, which have average life expectancies on the order of a few minutes.

(Source: Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram, January 2005)

Here’s the actual quote from the Honeynet report:

Data from the Symantec Deepsight Threat Management System indicates a vulnerable Win32 system has life expectancy not measured in months, but merely hours. The limited number of Win32 honeypots we have deployed support this, several being compromised in mere minutes. However, we did have two Win32 honeypots in Brazil online for several months before being compromised by worms.

Here’s the thing that’s either hilarious or pitiful, depending on whether you use Windows: Two years ago this week, Bill Gates announced that “Trustworthy Computing is the highest priority for all the work we are doing.”

He defines his new buzzword:

What I mean by this is that customers will always be able to rely on these systems to be available and to secure their information. Trustworthy Computing is computing that is as available, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony.