@mona >windows is the most popular there for the most attacked
windows is *not* the most popular OS.

MINIX (in Intel's ME backdoor) and Android (which uses the kernel, Linux) are the most popular OS's, followed by GNU/Linux, then BusyBox/Linux etc and then windows.

Even based off useragents from normie sites (which is not), windows usage is *dropping*, while Android and GNU/Linux usage is increasing.

The reason why windows is attacked so often is because its security is swiss cheese and so effective virus's etc are very easy to write, plus everyone runs the exact same configuration, as microsoft severely limits the basic ability to configure the OS and *properly* disable unwanted things without them being auto-activated later - thus you write one virus and can go ham with every single system until microsoft maybe works around the bug several months later.

Many very valuable systems, that are very important run GNU/Linux and therefore exploiting those is very tempting.

But it's very hard to write a virus that will work on more than a small percentage of GNU/Linux systems, as everyone has a different configurations and some love hardening their systems to be almost inpenetrable with SELinux.

For example the xz-utils backdoor utilized systemd, but every system that didn't run systemd, or didn't install the backdoored version (typically new released of software and tested before going into general release) were not vulnerable to it.

Some choose to run gnuTLS instead of openssl and those aren't vulnerable to any attacks against openssl (but those are still extremely rare).

windows furthermore has a poor security model, where people are encouraged to install arbitrary .exe's and kernel modules from the internet and trust that the proprietary malware authors serve their interests (they don't), while on GNU/Linux everything is checked and signed properly and installed via a package manager.

It's actually possible to have a secure OS on GNU/Linux, as it's possible to have only 100% free software installed.


Using the same AV may not be a problem if it's possible to configure it and add extra hardening if wanted and if the developers don't have a remote backdoor that they push updates that brick the system over.