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Don't Forget That Worms Happen Everywhere
friday2k writes "Securityfocus has a nice column on Worms and their origin in 1988. It explains what everybody should never forget. We have dealt with *NIX worms (Sadmind, li0n, ...) and they will come back again. Maybe then the MS fanatics will laugh and say: didn't we always tell you Open Source is insecure (too?) ..."
I once had an MCSE ask me, in all seriousness, why he couldn't type a fully-qualified hostname to choose a DNS server. It's a paper qualification; it implies no real skill or insight into the system's operation, or any sort of reasoning into consequences of limited design.
The Microsoft Certfied Systems Engineer certification does not claim to certify any knowledge of planning, implementing, configuring, or supporting DNS.
It tests a limited and well defined check list of skills, most having to do with installation and configuration. Only with the Windows 2000 series did the tests begin to measure planning and design skills.
The Windows 2000 and XP/.NET required tests - and the skills measured by each - are listed here:u lt.asp?PageID=mcp&PageCall=requirements&SubSite=ce rt/mcse&AnnMenu=mcse
http://www.microsoft.com/trainingandservices/defa
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Take a look at the SANS Institute's "Ten Most Critical Internet Security Threats" here.
Notice that the level of representation of MS products is quite low. Consider that the Open Source Community's conventional wisdom is that closed source leads to insecurity. I am risking the almighty flame when I say so, but here it is: Monoclonal OS prevalence is the issue, not open source versus closed source.
What I am saying is that the OS with the greatest market share attracts the hackers the most because they get the most "bang for the buck."
But two conclusions can be drawn about this observation, one good, one bad:
The good: the move towards an "OS ecosystem" of various flavors of OS is the healthiest for the Internet. Because if something like Code Red were to reappear, only a minority portion of the pie chart of OS prevalance would succumb, as opposed to the majority slice. I use the biological allegories "monoclonal" amd "ecosystyem" because you can say the same thing about crop resistance to insect/ bacterial/ fungal/ viral pests: the more the genetic similarity of crops, the greater the risk of one solitary biological pest taking out all of the Midwest as opposed to one cornfield.
The bad: Microsoft, having the greatest exposure to exploits now, is getting the most experience with dealing with exploits. Dealing with them at a business, PR, and technical level. The more you fight a war, the better you get at it, and Microsoft will only get better and better at it, the general public will only grow more and more confident with their fight, and less and less exploits will be discovered. Other OSs haven't borne the brunt of the kind of hacker attention yet that fosters this kind of improvement, unfortunately for us all, who live in the ecosystem of the Internet.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So, it's a nice thought, but I would be pissed if someone rebooted my server when I was working on it, or changed binaries on my system without my permission. Even if they meant well....
I forget the user name, but it's equivelent to nobody on *nix. You have to go screw it up yourself before it runs as root.
If you're gonna spread FUD, at least get it right!
---Most Definitely not a Karma Whore---
That should answer your question.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I use OS-X at work for networks research. I have a PowerBook G4 laptop w/ dual monitors (a regular monitor + the laptop screen), 500 MHz, 256 MB ram, 20 GB HD, 10/100 ethernet, 2 USB ports, 1 firewire port, 56K modem (which is thus far unused).
if you want to get a powerbook, wait about a month. OS-X.1 is in beta, and is expected in September. I work a company Apple considers a "Primier Developer," hence we get pre-releases and betas and all the other good stuff, and X.1 delivers on what it promises. X.1 makes a ton of serious improvements over X.0.4, the current patch. They made a lot of improvements to the GUI allowing the OS and programs running on it to be more responsive to user interactions. Plus several other enhancements like DVD support (which I have not yet tried)
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
I think there are 2 real points to the fact that *NIX systems are more secure. First of all, UNIX is more mature than MS software, therefore they have already been through the more trivial problems with holes. The second point is that because of Open Source customers get to choose what part of the software gets the most development. Security gets attention when those affect by bad securty get to decide.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
I have read a lot of posts in this discussion (and similar discussions in the past) talk about how *nix is better than NT. Then, some of the more level-headed among us pipe up and remind us that no OS is truly secure, and that the difference lies not with the system itself but with the system administrators. Thus, it follows that *nix admins are better than NT admins.
I most heartily disagree. Sure, there are *some* *nix admins that mop the floor with NT admins... but the opposite is also true.
I think we are all forgetting exactly what an "admin" is. An admin is *not* any JoeBlow@aol.com that stands up a web server! A system administrator is an IT professional who researches his work and prides himself on keeping his machines running smoothly.
If you think about it a little, I believe that you'll agree that the major cause of the whole Code Red problem is not the NT admins out there, but rather the JoeBlow@aol.com's who really don't know what they're doing. Ignorance, people... ignorance is our enemy! Not Bill Gates, not MS, not closed source! It's ignorance and apathy.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
It would be easy to say that "Open source provides faster fixes!", but that is not true. Alot of the *NIX worms were designed to exploit closed source *NIX systems (Solaris, VAX, etc).
The difference is in the technical competency of the systems administrators. A UNIX administrator is far more capable of detecting and fixing a compromise, whereas an NT administrator, for the most part, is far less literate when it comes to dealing with a security compromise.
Please note that this is a generalization, and holds true due to the fact that administering a UNIX server requires a higher level of competence than an NT server.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Windows (NT/2000) has some good security features in the kernel, the problem is that they are not properly used by the operating system as distributed by Microsoft. Locking things down would break too much stuff.
UNIX/Linux has an archaic security model that hasn't changed in decades.
Both operating systems suffer from being implemented in C, an unsafe language. It is possible to write secure code in C, but most people have neither the expertise nor time to do it correctly.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"Sooner or later" is effectively a LIE because whether it's sooner or it's later makes a huge difference in securityville. You're also ignoring the ``quality'' of the intrusion (such as carte blanche versus mere DoS).
Me for later, much later. While I could do even better, I use Mandrake 8.0 for production work. It's a bit bleeding edge in some ways - and I pay for that - but it comes with two massive advantages over many Linux distros: it installs reasonably securely unless you tell it not to (warns you when you install world-visible services and if you choose a "high security" install even disables those), and it can automagically update itself. Debian users in particular have long had these comforts.
All Linuces have at least five huge additional advantages over Windows:
Yes, administration makes a big difference, but all OSes are a loooooong way from interchangeable when it comes to vulnerability.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Granted, they could work with limited functionality under lesser accounts, but even then it's their decision to do that. You can hardly blame Microsoft for that.