Open Source And Viruses

Open Source And Viruses

Posted Jun 6, 2004 2:24 UTC (Sun) by vosechu (guest, #20549)
In reply to: Open Source And Viruses by ineiti
Parent article: Open Source And Viruses

The reason IIS is easy to hack is manyfold, just like windows. As you pointed out the market audience is not as savvy as the LAMP market.

The point that a lot of people miss (though it was touched on earlier) is that Linux is being hacked, often, and most of the time the hacks are both technical and social problems.

Look at the stanford hack earlier this year (maybe 2 months ago?). The reason it was so easy to hack Stanford was because the Unix boxes weren't updated in ages; this is standard. For a savvy person, an update isn't that hard, for a newbie it's impossible. For a production server it's frowned upon unless you have another that's the exact same hardware to rotate into place.

I can't count the number of Unix boxes I've reinstalled because I made the mistake of updating too often. Just like the windows market it's usually a good idea to wait about a month to see how many machines get broken before updating, but this is extremely difficult to do with Linux's facilities.

Viruses will take hold in Linux/Unix. They started in *nix they will come back. But as someone earlier mentioned there are already fixes in place. The part about Linux that will break viruses is not that it's technically superior, but that it's evolving. Eventually Linux will either move to a microkernel or a super-limited one, or GNU/Mach and GNU/HURD will gain acceptance and become a suitable alternative to GNU/Linux.

Viruses will hit *nix, *nix will evolve. Anyone know if there's a honeypot for viruses yet?

---

(Log in to post comments)