Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 5th Feb 2006 17:10 UTC
One of the biggest reasons for many people to switch to a UNIX desktop, away from Windows, is security. It is fairly common knowledge that UNIX-like systems are more secure than Windows. Whether this is true or not will not be up for debate in this short editorial; I will simply assume UNIX-like systems are more secure, for the sake of argument. However, how much is that increased security really worth for an average home user, when you break it down? According to me, fairly little. Here's why.
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Member since:
2005-08-18
"In UNIX-land a virus would have to be downloaded, set executable by the user, and then executed to do any damage."
Right. And there could never be a bug in, say, Evolution that made remote code execution possible, right?
All that's needed is a flawed application and you have an attack vector.
"Even if all this were done, it would still have to be executed as the root user to do any system damage."
There is other damage than a worm/virus wiping your harddisk. How about a DDOS flood or a botnet? They dont need root privilieges and on the grand scheme of things a DDOS flood is more destructive than your box getting rooted.