Security with Linux - Newbie

[Joshua Lee]

On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 17:06 -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 16:03:07 -0500, Joshua Lee <yid> wrote:
> 
> > Viruses are rare because Linux isn't a hospitable environment for them.
> > Spyware is impossible. Some forms of vulnerabilities exist on both
> 
> That's a little bit of a stretch -- there's little reason to believe
> that spy ware won't start to pop-up for *nix once it proliferates.

If you understood how spyware works you wouldn't say that. It depends on
"features" of Internet Explorer and the Windows TCP/IP stack, among
other things, that don't exist in *nix. 

This is Bill Gates' argument - he says that the reason why Windows is
more insecure than Linux is because of its popularity, and if Linux
becomes popular it will be as buggy and insecure as Windows. That isn't
the case. The amount of security problems with IIS is much greater than
the open source web-server Apache even though Apache is more popular
than IIS. The reasons are architectural.

> The one thing about *nix is that if a super-user account is
> compromised, a malicious and knowledgeable user can do *anything* to

Yes, and this is true of Windows too - except in Windows, typically you
*always* are running the administrator account. I did admit that some
security problems are true of both platforms - which is why I
recommended constantly tracking security upgrades in Linux, as you
should do in other OSs.