basic - continued

[Rashkae]

Knapp wrote:

> You need su to do it. There are no viruses that work with Linux but
> you can fool the user into being stupid and letting a trojan into the
> system. The basic trojan then needs to find a way to upgrade itself
> from user to super user. It can do this by fooling the user again or
> perhaps by running a piece of software with a known weakness that will
> then force the system to give out su access. It is not easy but it can
> be done. Many companies have given out prizes to anyone that could
> break their system because they thought it was not possible only to
> have to pay off the prize.
> 

Woa there, I'm all for Linux is more secure and all that, but that's 
just plain false information.  Admittedly, in the age of automatic 
updates, self propagating worms and virii are not seen as often, but 
what do you think all those hundreds of megabytes of Security updates 
are for?  (speaking as someone who *has* been rooted over net by a 
Apache worm several lifetimes ago)