Why does computer viruses are prevalent in Windows machines, but not on Mac or Linux machines?
In: Technology
I’m not sure how much this is really true anymore.
To the extent that it is, it’s two-fold. As other posters have said, Windows is a bigger pool to try to fish in. But there’s another point, which is that Windows until relatively recently didn’t have any built-in antivirus tools. And now that it does have Windows Defender, many people turn it off.
There’s also the fact that Windows is still struggling a little bit under its origins from being a single-user operating system. In an single-user operating system, you don’t expect anyone to use the computer except the person that owns it. Once you go multi-user, you need to engineer in a whole bunch of permissions systems after the fact just to handle legitimate, expected access.
While technically original UNIX was single-user, it quickly and early became multi-user. And Linux and BSD Unix (the foundation of MacOS) are both clean implementations from the ground up and have been multi-user (and expected to be on the Internet) from day one or very close to it.
So MacOS and Linux both have fundamentally better security measures *and* there are fewer of them.
Yes, the rich people live in the gated community. But there are a lot MORE people outside of the gated community…and they’re a heck of a lot easier to hit because they don’t have a guard post and a gate.
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