Re: Re rant about virii on VMS...

[Andreas Saurwein <saurwein () uniwares com>]

At 3/2/2004 16:57 Tuesday, you wrote:

> > > Antivirus scanners typically work by matching against patterns of
> > > known viruses.  For VMS that is the null set.
> > Hope you don't mind me saying this, but that's essentially a null
> > argument.

True.  Because VMS is so marginal in terms of userbase, it does not
attract the sort of anonymous attack that produces the well-known
Windows malware, so the lack of such attacks says nothing either way
about its security.


I dont believe that is has even to do with the number of attacks or the 
number of users. Any operating system which has as many "developers" as 
Windows, does receive lots of badly designed software. No matter how secure 
the OS is, developers always find ways to circumvent/ignore security 
requirements because they dont understand it, find it too difficult, or too 
intrusive for the user.
Take 1000 "Windows Developers" and analyse their knowledge about the OS. 
990 of them have no idea what is the difference between OS supplied 
functionality and C/C++ runtime libraries. Not to talk about security 
features of the OS.

This IS a matter of developer education and not of OS features.

Andreas