Quote: "With Windows 15 lines of VBscript and I have a a propagating virus that uses flaws in Outlook to spread."
Did you test it? Microsoft Fixxes security flaws on a daily basis, only Gentoo can boast the same.
Quote: "Also, killing Windows is a piece of cake, just delete everything or destroy the registry and they're forced to reinstall"
XP doesn't let you touch important files unless you do it at the asm level or have an authorised GUIID.
You can interupt and intercept important files, but not alter them... the Kernel just says 'no'.
Quote: " Linux they have to get root access first and then they can destroy files which can usually be replaced fairly easily. "
Wrong, you only need root access if your accessing files via SH Directory. You can complete move around that and catalog everything very quickly and easily if you access using your 'own' routines.
You take away files it might not stop Linux booting up, but you fail to see a bigger problem... it kills hardware (Windows DOESN'T!).
Windows is designed to crash, halt, shut-down and refuse to boot up; if given files are unaccessible or corrupt. This is to prevent hardware failiar. If you don't believe this is the case, I currently have a 13GB Hdd which blew out it's access circuitry in Linux during some routine networking, which I didn't realise it did until I put it into Windows to repartition and format.
It then intern decided to access and alter all sorts of weird files before going into a read loop which it can't get out of... that HDD is now technically dead.
If Windows didn't have those fail-safes in place I would be looking at 3 dead HDD and 2 dead Removeable Media Drives.
Rather than 1 dead HDD and the bitch of having to reinstall Windows.
An hour out of my life is better than the loss of more than 200GB of data which is irriplaceable.
Quote: "n Linux writing a destructive virus is really easy but getting it to spread is hard because it's usually thwarted by needing root access to spread on a single system or access to online servers to spread to others"
You realise that all Linux Distro's have an email client which seems to be bog standard, looks like Outlook, acts like Outlook and actually has the same security flaws as outlook.
using it and scanning for somethnig like EmmLM using that to access the system to create/destory programs via the CLI is quite frankly childs play. See a major difference here is your outlook virus would rely on the user having a setup email account, and then it has to pass through several areas of windows, anyone with Norton/McAffee will have it picked up and destoryed in the background without them noticing.
And if that doesn't get it a popup blocker will (because of how Outlook access' the net) this is ontop of if the user doesn't have default security measures and Windows isn't upto to date to have potencially stopped what your trying to do.
So your talking what, 1/80 people will be suspcetable to it.
Linux can access ports directly, you don't need SH to access anything (proxying through other programs who have access though would be the simplist way) ... which means you create the same thing for Linux 80/80 people will be susceptable.
Add to this when Microsoft learns of a new flaw they bridge it immediately (SP2 actually has tigher security than fort knox, i very much doubt anything scripted can get out even with default installation), with Linux you have to wait for the next distro... which is anyones guess. And that is all depending no if your problem is a high enough priority.
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The OS is Codenamed 'Evolution', Killswitch.
