Not so bad for Linux, but get grsec anyway

Not so bad for Linux, but get grsec anyway

Posted Dec 4, 2003 23:13 UTC (Thu) by emk (subscriber, #1128)
In reply to: Savanna.gnu.org compromised too by tymiles
Parent article: Savanna.gnu.org compromised too

No operating system is truly secure, although OpenBSD comes close.

Windows doesn't even seriously attempt to protect against local attacks, though, so Linux is still doing fairly well here.

As for the remote attacks, we've seen two different scenarios:

1) gentoo: The rsync daemon wasn't secure, allowing an attacker to run code on the gentoo server. This can happen to any network service.

2) Debian & Savannah: The attacker had access to an account on the machine.

So Linux is still looking pretty good, at least compared to Windows (if not OpenBSD).

But if you want more security, install the grsec kernel patch, which makes life truly difficult for the bad guys.

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