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.
Thread beginning with comment 93294
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2006-02-06
If you can't read the D.O.D. Orange Book (freely available on the web, as part of the Rainbow Books series, and it's REALLY old), and if you can't derive from reading that, that no computer system, that is entirely functional by being (a) maintained and (b) backupped and kept in working condition, is even WORTH locking in any major way or keeping secure in any other way - then of course, you'd type up such an article as this one right here. But 'can't read' and 'can't derive' are STILL the operative words.
For any OS you have: (1) make it operative, keep it functioning, stop anything that interferes with it's function; (2) keep it ready to restore by doing adequate backups which may be different for each setup, and do the same for your data; (3) then you first look at monitoring, logging, auditing, extend logging and checking for irregularities; (4) only afterwards should you start worrying about viruses, intrusion, et cetera. For each further step (1) through (4), the amount of attention you should give to the previous step at least doubles. That means that if you are, at all, in an environment that makes you check for irregular user intrusion once per day, you will have twice the attention on the log system, four times the attention on backups, and eight times the attention on machine operability. Then, things make sense. Otherwise, you got your priorities wrong. And it doesn't matter what OS you're using, really.
So you can, if you can of course, do that with just about any OS there is. The measures you have to take may be different - as in: dedicate machines, send log packets, keep backups, keep dual machines mirrored ready to be pulled out and started, et cetera. So maybe, 'can not' is another operative keyword for this article?
That's not all you have, right? This is just a teaser to see whether people realize this is just dumb, right? I mean, not serious, correct? After all, last weekend was carnival here...