Conrad Newton wrote:
This is pretty interesting. Do you know any more details? The story is consistent with my picture of what could happen: you read mail, mime calls a vulnerable program, and bang!
I'm afraid not, I was told about it around a year ago, it happened at one of the local universities and my source kept the guilty party anonymous.
Root access is dangerous of course, but normally I would not blame the user for reading their e-mail! What was the actual point of vulnerability?
On the contrary, the user in question was the admin for the machine and broke best practise repeatedly. First he logged directly onto the machine as root, second he started using the root account as a user account, and then he started an insecure process. The story reminded me of the old usenet joke about *nix viruses working on the honours system :)
For J. Average User, such as the teachers I've just given linux laptops to, I made it explicitly clear that although I was giving them root access, they really needed to know what they were doing because there would be no idiot traps to protect them from themselves and that they should only access root for as long as it was necessary for them to do what they needed.
Some of them have had those laptops for over a year now without incident, the only minor problem being that someone wanted to use the kde root wallpaper as their background :)
Yes, so maybe a short security article should concentrate on this point instead of discussing the highly theoretical possibility of viruses ...
Good idea, the threats to Linux arnt viruses, rather they are improperly configured services.
My original plan for a security article was to never even mention the word W....ws---just let the story speak for itself, and the guilty parties will know who they are! :-)
Given the 'facts' spinning around I dont think you can avoid mentioning the current best selling/rammed down peoples throats OS. But you should make clear that you cannot compare windows and linux like for like and that linux is not a free windows.
Regards, Ben --On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage