thebookpile | (no subject)

At the small telecom company that used to employ me, we had marketing/sales people using Windows and engineers/software developers using UNIX (either Solaris or Linux). The amount of time and trouble caused by Windows worms was crazy - at least from my point of view. In one case we had an outbreak, but there was also a lot of time and effort spent to establish preventative measures - and that's not considering the cold, hard cash that was spent on anti-virus software, etc.

The amount of time lost to worms and virii for UNIX was nil. All problems for the UNIX/Linux machines were network- or hardware-related.

So I'm not surprised to see that we've just lost $1.5-million fighting a worm that spread through a federal department. If the government had bought any other type of product or service that had cost that amount of money to fix, you can bet that there would be legal action to recoup some of the lost money and productivity. Not so with Windows. They'll just grin and bear it.

Why do people continue to accept this kind of stuff? I've had conversations with many Windows-using people about my Linux machines and one in two (roughly) always ask: "What kind of anti-virus software do you run?" Me: "Um, I don't need to run any."

* thebookpile - Windows-free since 1997 (and, consequently, worm+virus free since then, too).

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We use Windows at home and we've not had any worms ever, nor do we use any anti-virus software. Of course, my husband and i aren't total computer idiots and so we do a lot of stuff that minimises the odds of getting infected - like avoiding IE at all costs, for starters. You can't really blame MS for people being generally morons when it comes to all things computer.

As for Linux, my husband has tried to install it a few times, but the problem is he can never get it to properly support his graphics card or sound card or something, which makes it unusable.

What distribution of Linux did your husband try to install? I've had great luck with Ubuntu for my desktop systems.

I know I can't blame MS for people being morons, but those same morons let loose on UNIX/Linux desktops won't spread a worm across the entire department. And there's always the option of upping the security level, too (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SELinux). In a networked Windows environment, it only takes one weenie. I would trust my Windows machine on my own home network, where I have more control, but in a large department I wouldn't feel so safe.

My experience does pre-date Vista, though; I hope it's better in that regard.

He's tried a couple of different Linuxes, can't recall which. He's basically decided it's not worth the hassle, esp. given that we have no issues with Windows. Vista's brilliant.

I work as a unix sysadmin for a federal department. There have been times when in trying to troubleshoot something for a user (e.g. users in another government department who were trying to get theirs to add a firewall rule to allow them to use our online payment site for their transactions) when I have been asked by SECURITY people who my servers are not running anti-virus software.

Because allowing https traffic to our server not running Norton (or insert your favourite) is a huge risk.

And of course the stupid-ass TRA the other department was using asked all about anti-virus software, but not a thing about whether we had TRA's the server ourselves, or done anything (e.g. disabling open ports and unnecessary services) to lock down the server.

Because as everyone knows, a unix box running anti-virus software is automatically secure. Even if it has open telnet, smtp, anonymous ftp, web run as root user, database with default passwords on server, permissive rhosts, etc. The anti-virus makes it all safe.

Bow to the Anti-Virus Software! It is All-Seeing, All-Knowing, All...Dancing?!

Linux only OS to survive hacking contest in Vancouver, B.C. (http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Linux_Unhackable_At_TippingPoint_Contest_15743.html).

Okay, so this doesn't cover everything (it was only a 3-day contest), and Vista was compromised thanks to Adobe Flash, and the MacBook Air because of a Safari vulnerability.

Still...