[NBLUG/talk] Vulnerability of Linux to virus attacks

William Tracy afishionado at gmail.com
Sun Jan 6 09:53:51 PST 2008


On Jan 5, 2008 11:36 PM, E Frank Ball III <frankb at frankb.us> wrote:
> Linux users aren't running with root (administrative) privileges.
> Without root privileges your personal files can be corrupted, but the
> system cannot.

This is interesting.

The last time that I checked, Linspire has the user log in as root be
default. (They may have moved to a sudo-based model like Ubuntu by
now, I haven't checked.) The claim is that, on a home machine, the
integrity of the system isn't nearly as vital as the integrity of the
user's data.

The rest of the system can be restored by a simple reformat and
reinstall, the user's data cannot. So, it doesn't really matter from a
security standpoint if a desktop user is running logged in as root.

Furthermore, a worm can usually connect to the internet and spread
itself (or send spam, or whatever) as a normal user. You don't *need*
root privileges to do the things that most viruses do.

Now, I disagree that having someone run as root all the time is a good
idea, which is one of several reasons that I have stayed well away
from Linspire. However, there is an interesting reminder here that
running without root privileges is not panacea. There is a frightening
amount of things that an ordinary user can do.

It does make me wonder if it might be prudent to create a separate
user account with extremely draconian privileges, and always run the
web browser and mail client with that account.

-- 
William Tracy
afishionado at gmail.com -- wtracy at calpoly.edu

Assembly language experience is [important] for the maturity and
understanding of how computers work that it provides.
                -- D. Gries



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