[luau] Bastille's Beale: How to avoid security problems, Linux vs. Windows security

Kevin Goad kevg at hawaii.rr.com
Mon Nov 4 22:58:00 PST 2002


I found this article to be very informative.

http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/10/25/1728232

"It seems as if malicious hackers are targeting Linux more lately..."

Jay Beale(who serves as lead developer of the Bastille project): "I
really don't see that kind of trend here. Most of the vulnerability
hunting that gets done isn't really this targeted. It's much more
opportunistic. People found some juicy vulnerabilities in Apache and
wrote exploits. A little later, people start writing worms to automate
the process. This happens often enough. Honestly, I feel safer on Linux
partly because worms are such a rare occurrence, compared to the Windows
world, which has to spend so much time fighting each and every one. So
far, we've been a lot safer on Linux.

In terms of people attacking Linux instead of Windows, I'm very
encouraged by the chart on www.incidents.org , which shows that the top
attacked port by a wide margin is 137, used for Windows filesharing and
such. Port 80, which includes all the Slapper/Mighty worm activity,
appears to show at most half that much activity!

Anyway, I wouldn't throw out your Linux box just yet!"

I receive a daily news letter from http://www.zone-h.org/en, they seem
to be very unbiased when it comes to operating systems and deal with the
security of all of them without worrying how bad or good it makes their
favorite look. 

Kevin Goad
  




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