North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Worms versus Bots

  • From: Matthew Crocker
  • Date: Wed May 05 06:07:20 2004 
On May 5, 2004, at 5:13 AM, Paul Jakma wrote:


On Tue, 4 May 2004, chuck goolsbee wrote:


So maybe they WOULD be better with a "WebTV" model.

Or a Macintosh.

or a cheap Lidel or WalMart PC with Fedora 1 on it. Epiphany,
Evolution and OpenOffice would keep vast majority of the basic
computer users happy. Distributions like Fedora[0] are pretty much
invulnerable to mass, automated worm infections[1].

Automated worms would literally be a thing of the past if everyone
switched to Fedora, RHEL or if the current dominant OS vendor adopted
similar measures (apparently they will be). Judging by the amount of
packets (couple per s) I get in to common vulnerability ports, there
are a lot of worm infected machines out there:
We have all been through this before. Linux out of the box is generally no more secure than Windows. Linux can also be misconfigured and hacked. The reason why you don't see as many linux virus/worms is because there aren't as many linux desktops. Once Linux becomes a real player in the residential desktop OS market you'll see more and more worms/viruses running around because of it. Now, I love Linux, I have 30 linux servers in production but it isn't the be all, end all to mass user security.