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Imagine you're making a game that targets desktop and you can only target one platform. Do you launch on Windows, Mac, Linux, or something else? If you put pers
by rjf72 8y ago
Imagine you're making a game that targets desktop and you can only target one platform. Do you launch on Windows, Mac, Linux, or something else? If you put personal ideology aside, it'd be Windows every time because that's where the users are. Exact same thing for malware devs.
Malware targets Windows because that's where the users are. If the majority of people swapped to e.g. Mac or whatever else, then you'd see the majority of malware start to target Mac. You even see this as smaller players increase marketshare. E.g. in 2015 Macs ran into more malware than in the 5 previous years combined. [1] There was no major discovery or anything happening. The only thing that happened was that Macs gained a decent clip of marketshare, and so became more worthwhile to target.
[1] - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2459197-bit9-carbon-black-threat-research-report-2015.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2459197-bit9-carbon-...
- zrm 8y ago> Malware targets Windows because that's where the users are. If the majority of people swapped to e.g. Mac or whatever else, then you'd see the majority of malware start to target Mac. Even if this is true, it doesn't change the calculus for the individual company. If they switched to something else while everyone else is still on Windows, now they're using something with less malware targeting it. If everybody did that then maybe more malware would target the other thing, but that only matters if they mostly actually do and that actually causes there to be more malware than there is on Windows.