Linux Like Winows

[Stephen J. Turnbull <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> Richard == Richard <r.ibbotson [at] zetnet.co.uk> writes:

Richard> From my own point of view I find that it's good to have a
Richard> Linux machine that works in a similar way to MS Windows
Richard> or Macintosh.

Yes, but Linux is not a toy. Windows boxes and Macs can be exploited,
true, but you just don't hear as many stories like:

Luser: Hey Bob, I don't seem to have any disk space and Netscape is
REAL slow.
Sysadmin: Yeah, George, well, that's because you have 67,000
copyright-violating MP3s in your /home/bob/.../ directory, and
you've forwarded over 3 million spam messages since 8 am yesterday!
Good thing we have a T3, nobody else on site noticed.
Luser: But `ls' doesn't show any ... directory....
Sysadmin: garfle...

I read the smail man page carefully, and I _still_ ended up as an
unwitting spam distributor. Turned out that I turned something on
that I thought I was turning off.... (The default was no better :-b,
and at that time qmail was basically undocumented except for
Bernstein's claim that it had no bugs (raaight) and configuring
sendmail was not yet a job for amateurs.)

The recent Internet Audit found 350,000 Unix-like machines out there
(out of 24 million) that were vulnerable to at least one of 10 common
rootshell exploits. (Assuming that wasn't a hoax of some kind.) How
many more are vulnerable to others? How about you? Do you know your
vulnerabilities?

--
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Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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