Re: root login
Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo wrote:
On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 02:50:02PM -0700, Michael Toomim wrote:
And how services are being runned in each one? Is the Linux one a net
server and the windows one a desktop box? Are you taking care of
Yes. That's my point. People break into servers more than desktop
machines because then they can host warez on servers. But of course,
any unix *desktop* also has the potential to be a server, so it doesn't
matter if I only use it as a desktop. Crackers will turn it into a
server if they can.
installing security fixes? Are you taking care of closing services you
don't need to be provided to the Internet?
Yes, I turned off all unneeded services, etc. The latest breakin was a
debian stable (woody) machine that had been upgraded daily with all the
latest security updates. I think this was because of a flaw in the
commercial ssh package (ssh2). I realized after a while that it was a
really old version, and nobody at debian seemed to be maintaining it
even though it was a huge security hole. I reported a bug, but it took
a couple months for them to remove it from debian, and I had already
been rootkitted by then.
Security is something active.
This is an irrelevant point to the thread. I'm not blaming linux
security, I'm just saying that there are a lot of people and programs
out there trying to break through linux security systems. That point is
true no matter how hard I'm working to protect my computers.
But if you get the software from verified locations (which usually
means Debian, as you can get 99% of the software there) you won't be
infected.
Well, I got that ssh2 package from debian. It fucked me over.
The only difference between a multi-user system and a single-user system
from a virus-protection perspective is that it's possible to infect
multiple users simultaneously on a multi-user system. That'll *really*
slow your workstation to a crawl. :)
How? I cannot infect another user in this machine, because I don't
have rights to do so.
Say you have an email virus spreading across the internet. With a
multi-user system, a single computer can get infected multiple times --
once for each user that runs the attachment in his/her email.
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