Security with Linux - Newbie

Liz Young liz at kandew.com
Tue Feb 8 01:23:32 UTC 2005


On Sun February 6 2005 11:16 pm, Lindsay wrote:
> I have been of the understanding that Linux is relatively virus and
> intruder safe.  How accurate is my understanding of this?

Seems accurate to me. :-)  In my experience email viruses can't spread 
the Windows way because (for one reason) attachments can't execute 
without the user saving the file, and then changing the permissions to 
executable, and then launching it.  Too much hoop-jumping to get the 
thing to spread. I'm sure there are exceptions, but in general I think 
that's why we haven't seen many Linux based email viruses (I haven't 
seen any).

As far as being intruder safe, how about this weblog commenting on the 
Honeynet Project?
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/01/linux_security.html
"Recent data from our honeynet sensor grid reveals that the average life 
expectancy to compromise for an unpatched Linux system has increased 
from 72 hours to 3 months."

So, it appears as if some Linux based distributions  (SuSE and RedHat in 
that report) are getting more secure "out of the box", even as they 
gain in popularity.

-Liz




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