Reality Check

[caveman-jim]

Originally Posted by HAL10000

There are other factors that dwarf marketshare. Availability of tools, documentation, but more importantly, the bar set by the provider to keep people out. Apple set the bar high when it transitioned away from Sys9 to OSX. Microsoft followed suit years later with Vista. Apple, Microsoft, the FOSS community have all been regularly lifting this bar higher and higher, resulting in fewer people with adequate skills to deliver successful malware. The result was predictable with the recent rise of social engineering attacks.

This is where me and caveman-jim see eye-to-eye. Security incidents may soon become the result of user error, and likely people will prefer to blame Apple or Microsoft for their own dumb mistakes.

I think also that client applications will become more and more important; look at the negative press given to Adobe over Acrobat/Reader/Flash vulnerabilities and their response times for patching them.

Some of the vulnerabilities are because of how they wrote code; some are because of the platform they wrote them on (the IDE and compiler libraries).

Microsoft are going to need to address these issues as well.

[HAL10000]

Originally Posted by caveman-jim

I think also that client applications will become more and more important; look at the negative press given to Adobe over Acrobat/Reader/Flash vulnerabilities and their response times for patching them.

... or Safari. ... or Internet Explorer. Again, it's not about marketshare, but how easy the target is.

The flaws are no longer at the OS level, and when they are, they require so much skill and knowledge to circumvent, it's simply easier to get the user to bypass it all.

It's a new era.