Hi, lgcmn wrote on Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 11:05:01AM -0500:
> so my question is, do you feel that openbsd will be negatively > affected by any bad coding / scripts that have been installed > on the machine as Linux seems to have been... If the exploitable bug that got your machine owned is contained in third-party software and you run that third-party software on OpenBSD, that third-party software may be just as exploitable on OpenBSD as on Linux. Or it might be harder to attack if any of the exploit mitigation techniques that OpenBSD contains are relevant. Without precise information what exactly got exploited, i don't think that a more precise answer is possible. In general, how hard it is to successfully attack a machine depends more strongly on whether the machine is well-maintained or poorly maintained and poorly configured, and on which third-party software you have installed and are using, than on which operating system you are using (of course, unless it is a known-bad operating system like Microsoft Windows where there are very large numbers of exploitable bugs in the first place and long delays before patches are released to fix them). You won't be surprised to hear that many people on this list hold the opinion that properly maintaining an OpenBSD system is easier and takes less time than doing the same with Linux, and that it is likely harder to attack it if both are well-maintained. But that doesn't mean it is absolutely secure no matter what. And it also means that any system can only be secure when you know how to properly maintain it; that also applies to OpenBSD. Besides, such differences may not matter if you run sufficiently bad third-party software on top of it. Yours, Ingo
