Linux hacks hit all-time high (vnunet)
Posted Jun 12, 2003 19:06 UTC (Thu) by
jeleinweber (subscriber, #8326)
Parent article:
Linux hacks hit all-time high (vnunet)
If you read the article, what the slipshod journalism was counting
was total number of defaced websites at some (virtual) hosting sites.
This has practically _nothing_ to do with rates of attacks on systems
exposed to the internet.
At the firewall for my small organization, a conservative analysis
shows that at least 85% of the blocked packets are attempts against
Microsoft boxes. And for my parent organization, most of the
recent incidents of compromised hosts are windows-2000 boxes invaded
by password guessing attacks over the SMB and CIFS file sharing ports.
All may not be sweetness and light in the land of Linux security, but
the truth is the opposite of what the article claims: the bulk
of the attacks, the release of new exploits, and the compromise of
hosts all impact Windows a lot more heavily than Unix.
I'm in FIRST, and one of the botnets discussed there from earlier
this year had over 170,000 compromised windows boxes under a single
miscreant's control. Nothing remotely comparable has been seen on
the Unix side.
-- Jim Leinweber, BadgIRT, U. of Wisconsin - Madison
(
Log in to post comments)
