On Wed, 2010-11-10 at 10:36 -0800, Patrick Bartek wrote: > Lack of the usual indicators, that is, no odd application behavior, > no unusual slow-downs, no excessive CPU usage, no excessive or > abnormal net (or hard drive) activity, no crashes or freezes, no > strange log reports, no reports from friends about receiving spam > e-mails from me that I never sent, etc. > > I've spent enough time fixing friends' infected Windows machines that > I've gotten a "feel" for when something is amiss. It's not a > definitive feeling, just an indicator to start checking for something > wrong. I've seen comments made that the usual things you notice with a hacked Windows installation (where it's horribly sluggish and unstable), really only apply to Windows. Not to mention that an un-hacked, but otherwise crappily maintained, Windows box behaves just the same. Having your Linux box re-tasked to do a lot of work would probably be noticeable, but a hacked box might be abused in other (low load) ways, and you might be the sleeping zombie, waiting to be used. Or simply the anon proxy for one nefarious person, who doesn't do a lot of their illegal actions, but enough that you don't want to be held responsible for. And I'd be inclined to think that if someone was going to use you as a spam server, they'd probably be using their own list of recipients and random "from" addresses. I don't think it's that likely that you'd be crash happy with a hacked Linux computer. Crashing is in Window's nature. It's more than happy for the whole thing to come down in a mess, rather than just the errant program. I'd expect a bad program trying to be naughty on Linux to be the thing that crashed, while the rest of the computer kept on going. It certainly behaves that way when normal programs screw up. So, I wouldn't say "I don't think anybody could have hacked me, and I'm not going to check." -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
