Steve Brorens wrote:
No.There is always the question if SP2 contains Spyware. I am not a windows-expert but in IE6 there was something called Alexa which was detected as spyware by the tools I used.
I'd say that without SP2 your XP box will be probably infested with spyware which looks like you're 'being attacked', but none of that generally goes looking to spread like a virus or worm to other machines on the network.
Any windows worms you've got will try to spread - but can't bother a Linux box. (the absolute worst you're likely to see is if you had something like Blaster hammering away trying to infect things - and you'd probably never even notice that).
- steve
Unless you have a good reason not to I'd put SP2 and Microsoft's new
anti-spyware tool (turn on RealTime Protection and set the Autoupdater
time to a reasonable value) onto any XP boxes - and visit
windowsupdate.microsoft.com this time each month (there's a stack of
critical updates released today)
Um, is that really essential? When I was running windows I never used this online update. After some month I had only one virus and the standard windows-spyware. (See above)
-----Original Message-----
From: Lindsay [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, 8 February 2005 9:33 p.m.
To: CLUG
Subject: Re: Linux security - newbie
My Linux box is on a home network that has two windows boxes on it. Is
this going to make it a greater secuirty risk for me (one of the Windows
boxes, without SP2 on it, has been under a barrage of attackes recently.
The other with SP2 installed has been safe.)
On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 12:28 +1300, Michael JasonSmith wrote:
On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 20:17 +1300, Lindsay wrote:
I have been of the understanding that Linux is relatively virus and intruder safe. How accurate is my understanding of this?Others have nicely answered the question. However, be aware that any user on your system can still easily take down the entire machine under most setups. For a home box this is not much of a problem, but it can be an issue on bigger systems.
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