On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 05:56:34AM +0200, Martijn Dekkers wrote: > > I believe a lot depends on how you use the computer in question. When you > are a desktop-mostly user, it is a very good idea to not run as root. This > is mostly due to the fact that certain less secure application you use to > interact on the Internet can do nasty stuff to your machine (I'm looking at > you, IRC). Running as root allows them to do so with root privileges.
What are the security problems with IRC? I use it to chat in ASCII and make a log. Evidently it has other, more dangerous capabilities I'm not aware of. > > There are no significant *security* implications when running as root if > you mostly use linux as a server OS. Simply banging "sudo" in from of most > of your commands doesn't help you at all when it comes to security. There > is a small benefit in not having the root account having a password, in the > sense that everybody knows that there must be a root account on your > machine, so that becomes an immediate target for every cracker with a > rainbow table and some sort of shell access. Are there any drawbacks to naming the root account something other than 'root'? Perhaps by editing /etc/password and /etc/shadow? And, of course, renaming /root correspondingly? -- hendrik _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
