On Sun, 5 Feb 2017 07:01 pm, Wildman wrote: > Sure, you > could trick someone into running a program that could > mess with $HOME but that is all. For anyone, like me, > that makes regular backups, that is not a big problem. > To do any real damage to the system or install a key > logger or some other malicious software, root access > would be required.
The complacency of Linux users (and I include myself here) is frightening. Why do you value the OS more than your own personal files? In the worst case, you could re-install the OS is a couple of hours effort. Losing your personal files, your home directory and email, could be irreplaceable. You're also ignoring the possibility of privilege-escalation attacks. As far as "regular backups", well, you're just not thinking deviously enough. If I were to write a ransomware application, running as the regular user, I would have the application encrypt files and emails just a few at a time, over a period of many weeks, gradually increasing the rate. By the time the victim has realised that their files have been encrypted, their backups have been compromised too: you can restore from backup, but you'll be restoring the encrypted version. Obviously this requires tuning. How many files will people be willing to just write-off as lost rather than pay the ransom? How quickly do you accelerate the process of encrypting files to maximize the number of people who will pay? -- Steve “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
