Viewing 11 posts - 161 through 171 (of 171 total)
  • Online Fraud Advice
  • beaker
    Full Member

    Just curious…. So lesson here is use a Macbook and Safari to do the online banking rather than windows and Chrome?

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Obvious troll is obvious.

    beaker
    Full Member

    Reading back I can see why you’d sat that Cougar. I’m not a troll, never have been never will be- Go over my post history. I’d asked as we have both Mac and Windows in the house and the MAC OS is a version of Linux? Someone posted previously that we should ‘use Linux’ hence my post. I don’t want to start any sort of MAC vs PC debate but would like to know what is better for my online banking.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Mia culpa, I completely misunderstood your intentions. “Use a Mac” (and “Use Linux” for that matter) is a popular battle cry every time someone mentions PCs / Windows, I thought that’s where you were coming from. Please accept my apologies.

    I’ll give you a proper answer presently, but it’s not a one-liner answer and I have to leave here in a minute.

    beaker
    Full Member

    Thanks Cougar, I’ve seen loads of PC vs Mac threads in the past but didn’t want to turn this into one.

    701arvn
    Free Member

    I’ll start

    Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures

    but, the raw data may lead you astray and Mikko explains why here:

    Are Mac’s more secure than Windows?

    Cougar
    Full Member

    So, right.

    There are two separate issues here with regards to “security” and we never really got to the root cause of what happened in the OP’s case (though it was a month ago and I’ve not read back so I’m a little hazy). Let’s deal with them separately.

    The first is that the OP fell victim to a “phishing” website. For some reason he ended up at a website which looked like his bank’s, but wasn’t. The potential cause of this isn’t clear but it seems like the most likely option (and without looking up figures would I guess it’s the most common cause by rather a long way, following links in dodgy emails and the like). In this case, your platform is irrelevant, you’re already in the wrong place and the threat is external, outside of your control. You could be on a PC, a Mac, a phone, or an Internet-connected Commodore 64, a malicious website is a malicious website.

    The second is that he fell victim of some form of malware, a local infection. I don’t believe that this was a cause in the OP’s case as we scanned his PC and it came back clean. Here though, platform is important, the vast majority of malware targets Windows (though not for the reasons most people think). If your primary concern is malware then yes, a Mac or a Linux install would be one way to mitigate that threat (mostly but not entirely). But there are other options here around safe computing practices, and that’s probably a longer post for a later time.

    jam-bo
    Full Member

    though not for the reasons most people think)

    701arvn
    Free Member

    though not for the reasons most people think)

    As the diagram demonstrates, writing an exploit for a given vulnerability is more cost effective for a windows version (the ROI will be higher), because of the larger installed based, despite there being a greater number of vulnerabilities in, for instance, LINUX.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    That’s one ugly-ass graph, but yes, that’s exactly the reason.

    It also represents market share based on web browser hits I believe, which explains why the “NT” server share is so low. (Who surfs the Internet from a server? Typically, people downloading patches and people who need a career change.) In this context though, that probably increases its accuracy.

    beaker
    Full Member

    Thank you all for your posts and time. Every day is a school day it seems.

Viewing 11 posts - 161 through 171 (of 171 total)

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