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Because it only ruins the one person's life whose account got hacked. All the other users on the system are unaffected. Also, if it just ruins a user account,
by Karellen 4y ago
Because it only ruins the one person's life whose account got hacked. All the other users on the system are unaffected.
Also, if it just ruins a user account, you can simply delete that user's $HOME and restore their account from backups. If it elevates to root, you have to reformat the system and reinstall the whole OS from scratch (and hope it didn't patch the BIOS and/or hard disk firmware), and then reinstall all the user accounts from backups. Even if it's a single-user system, the non-root case is a lot less work to fix.
- 323 4y agoWhat other users? Pretty much all today's systems, either personal or server, are single user.
- SoftTalker 4y ago"Real People" users yes, now that most "systems" are containers or VMs, the number of users that are real people might be one or even often zero. But most linux services run under their own user identities, so even in that case you will likely have several if not dozens of users on a typical server, the idea being that if the "nginx" user is compromised, the "postgres" user is still safe. Also why it was a bad idea to have services running as "root" (or "system") as was more common a decade or two ago.
- Karellen 4y agoPlenty of households have lots of people using their own phone for social media and other consumption, but a shared laptop for times when a phone just isn't enough. Not everyone can afford a laptop per family member.