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Linux Distributions Respond to Forrester
dave writes "GNU/Linux vendors Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, and SUSE have joined together to give a common statement about the Forrester report entitled "Is Linux more Secure than Windows?". Despite the report's claim to incorporate a qualitative assessment of vendor reactions to serious vulnerabilities, it treats all vulnerabilities are equal, regardless of their risk to users. As a result, the conclusions drawn by Forrester have extremely limited real-world value for customers assessing the practical issue of how quickly serious vulnerabilities get fixed."
...but will they listen?
And who paid for the Forrestor study?? Not Red Hat they haven't got the cash. Probably another Microsoft funded event.
The most dramatic thing from my point of view is that SuSe, Red Hat, Mandrake and community based Debian all got together to formulate a common reply. This is the BEST news we could ever hope for - a common on unified front - no forking when it comes to security.
The story posted here is a direct quote from the response made by the Linux representatives to the report. I think that a greater effort should be made to get news from more impartial sources or to at least warn the reader that what he is reading is from an obviously biased source regardless of whether or not it is true.
_____
Thank you.
Yes, let's instead listen to the unbiased people at Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, and SUSE. Surely their opinions on this issue are less biased than those of the research company.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Does anybody know of a case where someone has been attacked through a Microsoft vulnerability between the time of its going public and the release of the patch? The most often encountered scenario seems to be people who never upgrade getting attacked because hackers have reverse engineered the patches.
Don't vendors sell things?
For the most part, Linux is used in the back rooms for such things as fileserving, printserving, and (especially critical for many companies) webserving. A failure on any one of these machines results in a significant risk of loss of data, company secrets, and company network infrastructure.
A breakin on a Windows system results in the loss of local data (whose value cannot be adequately assessed, but can be assumed to be less than the sum total of all data on the servers).
It is a little like assessing the risk of terrorism in transportation. The sheer number of automobile accidents far outweighs any risk of death due to terror attack on the highways. So too is the unlikelihood that a major terrorist attack will occur in the US skies or US rail system. However, an attack on rail cargo would be far more devastating than a similar attack on the highway system. Rail provides a very high bandwidth for cargo delivery but is also restricted to an unroutable track, so any attack on rail would essentially wipe out a very significant method of cargo transportation. On the other hand, traffic can be rerouted around any localized road problem minimizing the impact of any highway attack.
Windows is ubiquitous on the desktop, but on these desktops are very small amounts of data compared to the large amounts located on servers. A loss due to breakin would be necessarily less significant than a similar breakin on a Linux server.
I have been pwned because my
"Microsoft Corp., however, fixes security problems the quickest"
how can they claim that since Micro$oft receives bug reports that are not publicly announced???
It is easy to announce the bug along with the patch after having it hidden for 6 months...
The executive management of the agency that I work for pays Meta $500/hr to evaluate project plans... they always rubber stamp whatever answer the execs want.
And then when the project fails, they can go the higher-ups or shareholders and say "See, the plan was sound, it was that Anonymous little shit down in IT that screwed it up. Lay him/her off and ship the job to India!"
Then they all go celebrate their cost-cutting with booze and hookers, whilst lighting their cigars with $100 bills.
Man, these guys should work together on something.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
uh, sounds like a different study to me, jackass
Uh, Troll-boy. These companies are DEVOTED TO MAKING MONEY not research. RESEARCH just happens to be the product they are selling.
-_-
Just waiting for the slashbots to start lining up with the "But Linux is a kernel" argument, saying vulnerabilities in Apache etc do not mean Linux is vulnerable, but vulnerabilities in IIS make Win vulnerable.
These same slashbots will then talk about how "Linux is ready for the desktop". Not Gnome, not KDE but Linux.
Make up your minds. Either its an OS, or its a kernel. You cant pick and chose which one depending on the situation. If its a kernel, the Linux will NEVER be ready for the desktop. Gnome may be ready, KDE may be ready, but Linux will never be ready. If its the entire OS, then it is responsible for the vulnerabilities in Apache, sshd.
If Gnome is ready for the desktop, then Gnome on BSD is just as ready as Gnome on Linux, which is just as ready as Gnome under Cygwin.
Oh, and a terminal is NOT a usable desktop environment for your average end user. vi does not count as a word processor.
Its about time there was a mod score -1 Slashbot.
"Hey Microsoft, you guys have funded studies for us before. I know Linux is being a problem for you and we just so happen to be doing a study to see which OS is better, yours or theirs. Would you be interested in funding us once more? -nudge nudge, wink wink-"
convince risk averse managers that they are safely following the largest herd.
Unfortunately, the largest herd is heading for a cliff.
Or would a better analogy be:
Unfortunately, the largest herd is surrounded by a pack of wolves.
The first is funnier, but the second is probably more accurate (IE script kiddies mostly target MS Products), and it was more along the lines of my first thought.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
Like most linux geeks, I too believe that linux is much more secure than windows, but when asked why, I can only give some rant about how the open source methodology is superior and promotes faster response times to vulnerabilities. Either that, or I point to all the recent windows virus outbreaks.
But if linux were on every desktop, I'll bet you'd be getting a few emails every day with attachments like "your_paper.sh" that most of us would trivially delete, but many would stupidly run (and these are the same users who would login as root to check their email).
It wouldn't be fair to use instances like this (albeit they're not common yet) to show that linux is more vulnerable than windows.
Therefore, I believe that by quantifying the vulnerabilities and response time, Forrester is on the right track, they just need to take into consideration this response, and find a better method of quantifying the data.
The idea is that these vulnerbilities don't have equal impact at all. Lets examine some of the unix security vulns i've seen in the last few months.
3 or 4 games, unsafe handling of common scoreboard files producing exploits.
WHAT THE HELL? That's Unix security for you... even GAMES that have vulns get attention. Windows only gets remotely exploitable vuln attention.
Consider how many windows programs use shared registry keys, consider how many read/write to common temp folders, or common locations on disk. Have any of the probably hundreds of overflows involved in reading a temp file from C:\Winnt\Temp been taken into consideration with WIndows? Heck no, nobody even cares. Windows too many remote vulns to even pay attention to stuff like that.
Consider gzip's unsafe handling of temporary files. I wonder how many Winzip/Windows Compressed Folders have? NOBODY HAS EVEN LOOKED.
> Yes, let's instead listen to the unbiased people at Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, and SUSE. Surely their opinions on this issue are less biased than those of the research company.
And are these companies hiding this bias? The is no question what their agenda is (well, I suppose if one was an utter moron and didn't realize what each of these have in common). And, is the research ([sic]) company claiming to be unbiased? If I'm not mistaken, they claim to have done an independent investigation. Yet, I'm sure there is a few posts above here pointing out they are ready, willing and quite capable of producing exactly the results you pay for (and a post or two about who actually paid for these particular results).
Ads are broken.
I remember reading a report from one of these big research firms (I think) in 1997. It was a report first published in 1994. It talked about how Apple would own the desktop (90% probablility), NeXT would be a power player (90% probability), and how GuptaSoft would drive most IT application (90% probability).
Funny, the report was ALL about WRONG. Nothing was close to reality. How did they get it SO WRONG?
In another situation, I was directed by Management to ask one of these big research firms about embedded database products. At the time they didn't have any expertise in that area. However, they found a kid internal to the company that was willing to learn so they could write a report. It seemed silly and convoluted. Here's a guy without the necessary understanding or expertise, and in a few weeks he's going to learn and gather enough information to write a report? A Report that other people will use to make decisions? Crazy!
In the end, I concluded that these reports are useless "on the ground". They're only useful for those who wish to pretend that they've done adequate research.
So my short answer is: These research firms exist to just cover butts and promote positions. Any IT management personnel that subscribe to their services should be FIRED. It's negligent to cite their reports; it's negligent to use them as a resource. If you need expertise, hire a consultant with REAL expertise, not a generic and biased report. If you want a biased report, the sales guys will come to you for free.
I remember once I installed OpenBSD on an old SparcStation 1+ (that's 25Mhz) with a 1gig scsi drive. I was new to it, and so when the install process asked what "security level" I wanted to install at, I installed at one below the most secure. It was very strange. Very hard to get anything done, it had no path.
I changed the security level to "normal" because I just got freaked out by how strange it was; I only wanted to see if I could get the box running at all, and the heightened security level was making life difficult.
So the real study that someone should do, is how "ease of use" affects "security". Because that's where the real deal is at. It's just like having to go through the lines at the airport - the more secure we need to be, the more of a pain it is for everyone.
There is definitely an inverse relationship between "ease of use" and "security". Seeing as how there is a big focus on making Linux easy to use, or at least it seems to me that there is; I get the feeling that people won't accept Linux if it's not as easy to use as Windows or OS X, I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux security, or "user friendly" Linux security suffer a little bit.
But still, Linux has been designed from the outset with security in mind; other user-friendly OS's are designed for ease of use. It's going to take some time, but we are slowly going to move in the right direction. If Linux is a secure OS now, and some consultancy group says that it isn't, then the trick would be to make it LESS secure by making it more user-friendly, and immediately, consultancy groups and analysts will be saying that it is secure. But that's a sacrifice that's not really worth it. However, unfortunately, given the open nature of Linux, and that fact that it can go in many directions, we will probably see Linuxes that are less secure than they could be because of the focus on user-friendliness. So I guess that means that analysts are going to change their minds? I wouldn't be surprised.
One thing that I don't see mentioned is that as the gnu/linux base grows larger, so do the proportion of competent developers who can spot and fix code security problems before they go mainstream. With MS, the number of people looking to spot code security problems reamins constant no matter how big the user base.
Although I've herd MS say that the reason Linux hasn't had as many big security problems is because they aren't used as much, I think the truth will turn out to be just the opposite. Not to mention that a hacker who finds a security flaw in Linux is more tempted to get fame by reporting it, and that fame becomes more prestigious as Linus grows, but a hacker who finds a security flaw in windows will be more tempted to gain fame by exploiting it.
Was sarcasm I believe, don't drink so much coffee man
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Yeah! Its So Obvious Linux Is More Secure Than Windows!
Just Don't Store Your Important Source Code On It.... :))))))))))))
Rob Enderle, formerly of Forrester writes:
In high school, I remember learning that averages don't give a good representation, because extremes will skew the numbers. The median is a better representation.
First of all, it's called a "mean", not an average. It's a type of average. The median is also an average. So is the mode.
Secondly, the median is not necessarily a better representation, just different. With the median, for example, you have *no idea* whether there are any extreme outliers. 1,1,2,5000000,90000000000. Median is 2. Is that representative of that set of numbers? Not really. The mean would give you a much better idea of what range of numbers you're dealing with in that case. That's why real statistics with distribution curves and standard deviation are important.
Anyway, I'm done nitpicking. I agree that these reports are blatantly skewed. This is not really a surprise. Almost all research is funded and biased these days. Much like news media. It's a simple fact of life. The important thing is to know your source, and try to understand their motivations.
When the next "scientific study" comes along saying that P2P increases music sales, no matter how much you believe that to be true, you need to take a look at who's writing it, and why. Is this some graduate student who is probably downloading his own MP3s all the time and just trying to justify their habits to the world? Perhaps not, but it's wise to make sure before you start throwing his or her study around as if it were gospel.
Sorry if that sounded as if it was directed at you, it wasn't really. It's just some good advice (in my opinion).
Random and weird software I've written.
The IT research firm I work for has been contracted by Microsoft to study the Linux vs Windows value to corporations just recently (last week).
Microsoft, for the first time, paid in full advance even before a full proposal could be drafted, or even basic details.
They initially wanted a TCO study, and our CEO told them to NOT DO THAT, he is very honest, and knew beforehand Windows would lose. On the other hand, ew do not know what will happen.
The reality is that under some very common scenarios, at least where I live, Linux expertise is regarded as expensive, and that some Microsoft apps allow companies to get work done quicker.
If you where to look at the Linux trend of adoption, growing support, etc., regarded retraining costs as an investment into future savings, noted that Microsoft is free to change it's pricing policy anytime, and they can force you to demand more than you want in the future, and that after 3 years you own nothing at all (license obsolete, or app obsolete), then you'll see Linux wining by large.
But guess what, Research firms, even unbiased ones, tend to choose scenarios that are real world, but benefit their customers more.
If IT adopters where the ones financing these research studies, then the story would be different. But guess what? They dont pay much, and if they do, then Microsoft and the likes can double the bet to get what they want or, as someone else put it, they'd pay you $400 so that you'll "agree" with whatever their CIO believes is true. The same happens with newspapers, what you read is 90% dicatated by the ads they can sell in that "section". Thats why you always see some Cars suplement, because people like it, but MORE importantly, because they can sell expensive adds.
If you want unbiased researchers, find a way to fund that does not involved their reveneus depending on an interested party.
unfinished: (adj.)
Much of my daily spam now comes from compromised Windows boxes being run as spam zombies.
My personal data was stolen from a company I trusted because their server was running IIS and it was infected with Slammer.
I suffer because of Windows insecurity almost constantly, yet no operating system *except* Windows has ever caused me any such grief. Clearly the Forrester "data" is FUD. Plain and simple.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.