[70218] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Worms versus Bots
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeff Workman)
Wed May 5 14:20:39 2004
Date: Wed, 05 May 2004 14:23:11 -0400
From: Jeff Workman <jworkman@pimpworks.org>
To: Matthew Crocker <matthew@crocker.com>,
"'nanog@merit.edu'" <nanog@merit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <AA2634B8-9E7B-11D8-8044-000A956885D4@crocker.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
--On Wednesday, May 05, 2004 6:04 AM -0400 Matthew Crocker
<matthew@crocker.com> wrote:
> We have all been through this before. Linux out of the box is generally
> no more secure than Windows. Linux can also be misconfigured and hacked.
> The reason why you don't see as many linux virus/worms is because there
> aren't as many linux desktops. Once Linux becomes a real player in the
> residential desktop OS market you'll see more and more worms/viruses
> running around because of it. Now, I love Linux, I have 30 linux
> servers in production but it isn't the be all, end all to mass user
> security.
In the past this may have been true, it's been my experience that most
modern Linux distributions have adopted (more or less) the approach that
OpenBSD has: Leave services turned off by default. In fact, a typical
RedHat workstation installation goes a step further by not even installing
a lot of services by default. Sure, Joe Sixpack can still install
everything and uncomment everything from /etc/inetd.conf[1] and get himself
pwned, but I don't think we have to worry much about your average computer
user doing this.
-J
[1] Actually since RedHat uses xinetd, it involves a little more work to
turn _everything_ on.
--
Jeff Workman | jworkman@pimpworks.org | http://www.pimpworks.org
