[br1]

If everybody else is patched, bad buys don't have much incentive to write attacks. It's herd immunity. You have chosen no to vaccinate.

[sandworm101]

Except that the smallpox virus doesn't have the brains to team up with a thousand other viruses, create an exploit kit, test your immune system, and then deploy only the one specific tool most likely to bring you down. The immunology metaphor breaks down once we realize that electronic pathogens are deployed not by innocent rats but sentient human vectors.

[InclinedPlane]

Smallpox also doesn't know the difference between Joe Blow and Mark Zuckerberg. Humans have the ability to pick the most valuable targets and concentrate resources on exploiting them.

[morcheeba]

respectfully, ha ha. Just because an exploit is old doesn't mean it still doesn't get used.

Attacks don't follow the close-quarters-infection that physical viruses do, so it's a bad model to use.

[MertsA]

That's not entirely without precedent. Look at macOS, still comparatively little malware compared to Windows even though macOS has had quite a bit more vulnerabilities in the OS itself compared to Windows.

[rorosaurus]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Free_riding