James Knott wrote: > Mark wrote: >> And the only reason that Linux and Macs are so relatively safe from >> viruses and worms is because they aren't targeted, not because they >> are fundamentally more secure. >> >> > Well, considering that most web sites run Apache on Linux or Unix, I'm > not so sure about that. And if you investigate the way Windows and > Linux/Unix are designed, I'm certain you're wrong. You might want to > read up on how IE became so tightly coupled with the OS. You can start > with the Netscape vs Microsoft trial, where MS claimed IE could not be > removed, because it was part of the OS. At that time it wasn't, but > next version of Windows (W98 IIRC) it was and as a result, Windows has > been wide open to attack via IE. Then you can look at how difficult it > is for a virus to propagate in Linux/Unix because a user cannot write to > files outside his authorized areas etc. And, of course, Unix was > designed from the ground up to be multiuser and had appropriate > protection mechansims built in. Windows was built on top of single user > DOS and then tried to have all the holes fixed. > > Bottom line, there are a lot of technical and usage reasons that make it > much harder for malware to attack Linux/Unix. > > the "big" problem here is that the target for said malware have changed... its no longer about bringing down whole systems. these days its the users data they are after. credit card info, codes of all kinds, and just about anything else. was there not a sweep of ransom attacks where a worm would archive the whole content of the users document dir, and encrypt the archive? leaving a message to send x amount of money to some account for the password? under these situations, read access is more then enough access, most of the time. the only option i can see for the user then is to run every program he tries to make use of online, inside some kind of chroot can. but even thats not perfect. basically, the only really safe option is to yank that plug, and use only home-coded apps... _______________________________________________ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@xxxxxxxxx https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
