We've already seen outright kernel exploits and holes in the 2.6 series of kernels. I don't know about you, but I don't even remember there being a Windows security flaw that used the kernel.
Windows felt the same pain a couple years ago. I'm too lazy to do the research, but the first things that come to mind are the WM_TIMER shatter attacks. (Ok, technically that's the GDI and not the kernel, but same concept.) No one cared about them either. Why? Because you need a local session or some kind of execute privilege to exploit them. In the end, they're not very useful to a would-be attacker; RPC and DCOM, for example, are/were much easier to exploit because an attacker could do it remotely. Therefore those vulnerabilities got all the attention.
I don't even bother applying most of the kernel updates to my home system because I'm the only person who uses it and I run the same few apps over and over. If I do decide to run something new, I make sure it's from a source I trust - something that should be done regardless of platform.
Bollocks. The UNIX "filesystem standard" fragments things way more than Windows does. With Windows, you know a few places to look for a malicious program to get rid of it--\Windows, \Windows\System, \Program Files, and so on. There aren't a lot of places. Linux, on the other hand? Where do you look? /usr, /usr/bin/, /usr/shared/bin, /usr/local, /usr/local/bin, /opt/bin, /opt/local/bin...and that's just the executable,...
Well most people don't run as root on their Linux boxes, so looking in those directories isn't an issue. If you could actually run Windows under an unprivileged account, then looking through WINNT, SYSTEM32, Program Files, etc wouldn't be an issue either. The problem is, much of the software for Windows is so poorly written that it assumes you do have admin access. Case in point: I have to jump through my own ass to get Jump Start Spanish to work on my daughter's machine. It tries to open a DLL in WINNT with write access every time it opens! My daughter runs under an account that is only a member of the Users group, so the program aborts with a meaningless error message. I had similar experiences with her (crappy) digital camera software. Simply because I refuse to let a 10 year old run under an admin account I spend more time administering that machine than the other 3 in my house put together (1 more Windows, 2 Linux).
That's why Windows machines are so much more vulnerable to scumware: most people lack the time and expertise to develop workarounds for all these crappy little programs so they're forced to run as an admin.
While FF should be inherently safer from malware because it's not "integrated into the OS," people probably won't be any safer because they're running under administrator anyway.
Believe me, malicious software writers would find a way you haven't thought of to screw people. That's what they do.
Agreed.
