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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RE[3]: Ok... but please explain this...
by tomcat on Tue 7th Feb 2006 01:47
in reply to "RE[2]: Ok... but please explain this..."
Member since:2006-01-06
Virus writers are a bit more clever than you're giving them credit for. They don't need to execute their code from a rpm at all. The best choice is from firefox or another browser. They can trigger a buffer overflow and then use that launching pad to trigger additional buffer overflows in the Linux kernel (they have to find them first, but nobody should be daft enough to suggest that they don't -- or can't -- exist), since one was found as recently as November 2005 (http://secunia.com/advisories/17384/).
Member since:
2006-02-06
You've obviously got no idea of how an rpm is installed. A user would have to have administrator level priviledges to install anything. Also, it's a pretty strange *nix system that would actually work by simply clicking on the file... Every setup I have ever seen required the user to follow through with some type of package manager (YAST, ap4rpm, SOMETHING) and that exponentially reduces the chances of this happening. Besides, again we are talking about user abuse of the system, something NO OS, EVEN LINUX, BSD and the rest of the *nix, can ever do and still be a useful tool or toy for the user.