It's about diversity

Posted Nov 4, 2004 16:24 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224)
Parent article: Linux: security through obscurity?

I think this article also misses another HUGE reason why Linux hasn't been attacked - it's way to diverse.

Where one attack on one version of Windows may hit the vast majority of installed Windows systems, the same cannot be said of Linux. While an attack may work on say Red Hat 7.3 or some specific version, it usually doesn't work on Red Hat 8 or 9, much less any version of Mandrake or Debian or any other distro.

The reasons for this are many and varied: different libc versions, different installed applications, different defaults, etc. And each one of these differences makes it all that much harder for an attacker to write a single attack on Linux systems.

This diversity drastically limits the amount of damage any single attack can do to the "Linux" community.