"It's not safe to run an internet facing Windows box right now," a hacker who used to work in the US Department of Defense said to Motherboard.

I'm thinking this could be a good time to introduce your friends to #Linux.

I wrote a bit on why over on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/65gnkm/this_could_be_a_good_time_to_talk_to_your_friends/

#ShadowBrokers

@forteller from an exploit mitigation perspective, the main Linux distributions trail behind Windows. With grsecurity making their patch private, all distributions will fall behind. When it comes down to it, Windows is likely more secure than stock Linux. It's simply that Windows has a larger market share on the desktop. If Linux had that same market share, you'd see it be targeted more.

@lattera If Linux had a larger market share then there would be more eyes and resources on finding and fixing security holes too. Just think what could be done if say 5-10 countries switched all their administrative PCs in government, police, healthcare, etc to Linux and spent all the Win+MS Office license money on making Linux better.

@forteller @lattera Linux has an enormous market share on servers (Without Linux the Internet would stop working), phones and gadgets, but not so much on desktops. Companies like Google and IBM have been putting money into Linux development since years. Agreed on the money saving re: Microsoft. Money flowing towards Redmond WA, USA is like a black hole, and not worth it.

@yellowfrog @forteller and, yet, nearly all the IoT devices that run Linux have critical vulnerabilities that will never, ever be fixed.

@lattera @forteller Yes, indeed. A terrible truth.

@forteller @lattera @yellowfrog honest question: are the vulnerabilities in the actual kernel or on the software running on top of it?

@Maltimore @forteller @yellowfrog both

@lattera @Maltimore @yellowfrog There's always voulnerabilities in all software would be my guess (I am not a coder)

@lattera @yellowfrog @forteller well that's a very fatalist point of view. The conclusion of that would be that I could also just do my online banking with internet explorer on windows (ugh). Sure all software has vulnerabilities but some more than others.

@Maltimore @lattera @yellowfrog You just litteraly said the same thing that I did, though ;) I never said there's no differences, or else I wouldn't have posted that original toot in the first place :)