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I remember installing Red Hat 4, going on IRC and getting rooted. Red Hat's approach comes from lots of learning, and I think it's smart. Thanks for the post.
by codezero 13y ago
I remember installing Red Hat 4, going on IRC and getting rooted. Red Hat's approach comes from lots of learning, and I think it's smart. Thanks for the post.
- antihero 13y agoCould you elaborate as to how this happened?
- codezero 13y agoLots of not up to date services were installed and activated by default. Exploits were abundant.
- jlgaddis 13y agoYears ago, Linux distributions defaulted to installing everything and the kitchen sink and enabling all those services automatically. After years of "OOTB pwnage", they started to make things a bit more secure by default and they eventually got to the point we're at today (where most installations are relatively secure by default, OOTB). (Side note: I believe it was RHL 5.2 that shipped with wu-ftpd enabled out of the box. By the time it shipped (or shortly afterwards, I forget which), there was a remote root exploit for wu-ftpd. Thus, if you installed RHL 5.2, you'd likely get pwned in short order.)
- codezero 13y agoThis is exactly correct. I was a Slackware zealot for a long time but frequently tried Red Hat because my boss back then was a big fan. I didn't actually convert to appreciating Red Hat until I worked there and learned the advantages of using RPM and other tools included in Red Hat that were absent in Slackware. In either scenario, and this is still true today, if you plan to connect your system to the Internet, you need to know your configuration and care for the system after it is live. Modern distros help with this a lot by offering rapid package updates, automatic updating and smarter firewall and security measures. A lot of this stuff was controlled by very esoteric text configuration files in the past, which made it hard even for a savvy person to get right every time.