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An interesting article, but I have to disagree with his conclusions about the effect on malware. I'd say that mainstream Linux adoption would likely be dominat
by javanix 16y ago
An interesting article, but I have to disagree with his conclusions about the effect on malware.
I'd say that mainstream Linux adoption would likely be dominated by 1 or 2 major distros, like Ubuntu. Any potential attack vector could be targeted at that distro's package management system, for instance, and be assured of some impact.
In addition, many distros share a common underlying base system (like Debian) - any child distros of a vulnerable system would also presumably share the same vulnerabilities.
- pipeline_tux 16y agoI also disagree on points 1 and 2 but for different reasons. We're still going to need antivirus as long as less computer literate people download and run random executables. Gaining root or administrator privileges isn't necessary for the common tasks that malware does such as spending spam or getting the user's usernames/passwords/credit card details. Also, despite its stronger security model, all it takes is one script that runs as root to have the wrong permissions set, or to read/execute other executables which have wrong permissions and you've got root. I'm not sure if the common packages on standard Linux desktop machines are configured correctly out of the box (I'd hope that they are), but this is worryingly common in corporate/enterprise environments. There are also bugs in other packages (including the kernel) which can be used for privilege escalation through buffer overflows, etc (although these tend to be patched fairly quickly)
- Splines 16y agos/his/her/