RHEL, kernel vulnerabilities, and days of risk [LWN.net]

RHEL, kernel vulnerabilities, and days of risk

Posted Mar 24, 2005 1:26 UTC (Thu) by brianomahoney (subscriber, #6206)
Parent article: RHEL, kernel vulnerabilities, and days of risk

There are three, orthogonal, conclusions to be drawn from all this nonsense:

1. Security is now a REAL purchase descriminator, and M$ is scared,

2. The PHB effect is alive and well, M$ exploits FUD and flawed statistics.

3. Re-learned lessons eg a non-executable stack, enforced by hardware;
tools like the Stanford checker, professional development and peer review
all help

The reality though is practical experience; I have been on the broadband,
always on, internet since 1992, and though I see a lot of intrusion attempts, mostly pathetic, in the logs I have had NO 0, problems with SunOS on sparc or Linux on ia32.

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RHEL, kernel vulnerabilities, and days of risk

Posted Mar 24, 2005 16:03 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Lucky you. Some security upgrade to Solaris here around 2000 (re)installed a remote administration package (which we had removed). Said package had (known) holes you could drive trucks through... and some kid promptly remotely administered the machine. Had a nice 24 hour day restoring everything and making sure no further holes were present.

That incident, BTW, gave the last argument for migrating the servers to Linux (many desktops had been Linux for quite some time). First on the (ageing) Suns (even got better performance with Linux!), later on custom-build PCs. We see lots of (mostly very pathetic) intrusion attempts, no success to date (AFAIK...).

RHEL, kernel vulnerabilities, and days of risk

Posted Mar 28, 2005 16:43 UTC (Mon) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

To be fair, the same problem (patches reenabling services) happens on Linux
as well. Debian is especially bad about this due to the "if it is installed
we assume you want to run it" policy.

RHEL, kernel vulnerabilities, and days of risk

Posted Mar 24, 2005 23:29 UTC (Thu) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813) [Link]

Much of the security of any Internet server is in the hands of the administrator. Vulnerability stats <> the security of a system. A good admin with enough time to do the job generally results in a secure installation.