On Tuesday 21 Oct 2003 3:18 am, Dan Jones wrote: > He did make a couple of valid point, although he doesn't make them > very well, and they don't really rebut the article he's addressing. > One, as Linux becomes more popular on the desktop, the temptation > to "dump it down" becomes very strong. I've never used Lindows, > but I understand that it's default install is quite unsecure and > even uses root as the default user.
As I understand it, the original Lindows did, but that was quickly withdrawn and replaced by a version that did not. That does not negate your point though. > (I believe this was mentioned > in the original article.) This doesn't negate the security > advantage Linux has over Windows, but it definitely narrows the > gap. > > Second, patches to fix the vulnerabilities exploited by the recent > worms have been available for quite awhile. Normal users don't > patch their systems. As Linux becomes more common, the number of > unsecure systems out there will increase, which means we will see > an increases in the number of Linux exploits in the wild. They > won't be as numerous as Windows exploits, because the *nix > architecture exposes fewer hooks, but they will come. I see the blind faith that it can't happen to us as the greatest risk. OK, if I'm careful about root usage it's limited in what it can do, but destroying data under my home directory would be devastating enough, and I'm not convinced that that could not be done. Anne -- Registered Linux User No.293302 Have you visited http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org yet?
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