CNN.com – Expert: Microsoft dominance poses security threat – Feb. 16, 2004:
Geer and others believe Microsoft’s software is so dangerously pervasive that a virus capable of exploiting even a single flaw in its operating systems could wreak havoc.
[ . . . ]
“Once you start down the road with that analogy, you get stuck in it,” said Scott Charney, chief security strategist for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft.
Charney says monoculture theory doesn’t suggest any reasonable solutions; more use of the Linux open-source operating system, a rival to Microsoft Windows, might create a “duoculture,” but that would hardly deter sophisticated hackers.
If you factor in evolution and the various ways organisms come up with to defend themselves, there’s more to this analogy. Those that can adapt to changing conditions might survive: no guarantees for those that are not able — or unwilling — to adapt.
Pursuing this line of thought in bio-medical terms leads one to ideas like quarantines for known disease carriers, inoculations, and euthanization if a great die-off doesn’t come first.
<update: Feb 19, 2004> Of course, I completely missed the reference to “sophisticated hackers.” When did that become the problem? What we’ve seen so far with the vast majority of these Windows exploits are crimes of opportunity, or schoolboy pranks writ large.
We’re not seeing home computers being used to clean out bank accounts or anything like that: all we’re seeing is immature vandals wreaking their small-minded version of havoc on the commons, soaking up network bandwidth, overloading mail servers and inboxes. A preventable annoyance . . .