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Is Your OS Tough Enough?
LE UI Guy writes "A Denver Post article examines the Internet 'horrors' Windows, Mac and Linux users face simply being connected to the Internet with only an out-of-box configuration. Over the course of a single week the machines were scanned 46,255 times. The test didn't look into additional security threats caused by surfing the web or reading e-mail, just the connection itself."
If you build it, they will come.
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This news isn't news. What's news is this news is in the news!
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Look at all of the software and services running on a modern linux distro - FC3 for example. I have spent a great deal of time shutting off everything I really don't need and erasing piles of useless rpms installed by the distro (its 2005 - I don't need talk). Any software you don't use or services you do not need are just potential security holes.
Just because people can knock on every door doesn't mean that every door is as insecure as the next. You can knock on every door in a neighborhood, but some will be better constructed and have more secure locks. Still, none prevent one from knocking.
If they're only tracking ping/scan attempts, there is no reason to even include mac/linux in this.
These results mirror what I typically see on my workstation. I run a couple of websites on my workstation including our laboratory website, and my blog. Logs are monitored constantly with a nice tool called mkconsole that displays the logs transparently on my desktop. Several times a week, there is an attack. Most however are either scripted or fairly primitive, although last week there was a sophisticated attack that that bounced through a compromised Windows machine on campus. We tracked it back to an AOL user on the East coast and reported his IP address to the sysadmins. They sent an email back to me letting me know that they would follow it up. I've not heard anything else since, but in addition to using a more secure OS, one should also maintain a vigilance of your systems to help keep things under control and if you do use Windows, PLEASE keep it patched with recent security releases.
The truth is that if somebody really does want to get into your system, it can happen. In addition to using a secure OS and keeping the security updates current, securing physical access is your next line of defense.
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Obligatory: On piles and piles of money. :-)
I got stuck in the self-checkout line at Walmart once, behind a lady who had this same problem.
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
TFA tells us that Windows XP SP2 is more secure than Windows XP SP1 (unbelievable!!) and that there are fewer attackers targeting Linux and MacOS than Windows (hmmm - I wonder why ?).
Very thought provoking and innovative information indeed.
From what I remember in Tron, this visually looks very cool. Digital warriors fighting on a neon grid, etc.
I'm pretty stumped, though. I tried to get my box pwned eight times, just to see the digital battle. I thought at the least Norton Antivirus would sent a digital probe destroyer bot out to eradicate the trojans. But all that happened was my computer got really slow, and pop-ups kept showing up, advertising herbal virility pills for men.
Come to think of it, Hollywood movies never seem to match up with what my computer does. That's it, I'm going to stop believing them movies and start reading Wikipedia instead.
According the article, no one was all that surprised Win XP SP 1 went down in 18 minutes. After all, it is not up to date... it is essentially an old OS, right? So this is expected, right? Old OSs should be broken into, right? And then we have OS X 10.2, aka, Jaguar. No successful attacks. Older OS, check. Not up to date with all the latest security features that are in Panther, check. And not one successful attack. One company makes on OS that still stands after two and a half years... one company makes an OS that only stands after a major major major patch and constant updates that sometimes break software. Now, which company's OS would I choose to build a secure network? Sure, it's a flawed argument, but still I think worth noting.
Microsoft might have something with Windows Longhorn, since the entire API outside of the kernel will be written in C# completely sandboxed in a CLR, much like Java.
Combined with a monolithic auto-update system, Microsoft has no intentions of repeating the problems of Windows 2000/XP when they release Longhorn, much like they had no intention of repeating the problems of stability they had with Windows 95/98/ME when they designed Windows 2000/XP. For as much as they do, they mostly won with stability in 2000/XP, and they could win again, despite their market share, by sacrificing RAM (480MB commit charge, 1GB recommended) and processing power by implementing the .NET framework for their entire API.
I honestly hope open source has something to compete for their future desktop environments, or else desktop Linux could be relegated to processors too slow to deal with the overhead.
- - - - - Fear not the reaper, but my shiny white teeth.
You are anonymous, and most likely you are attempting to troll. I probably should not have bitten but what can I say, it gave me the chance to rant a bit.
The article makes great mention of "attacks" but fails to mention what an "attack" actually consists of.
For example: they say Windows XP SP2 got attacked 16 times.
Does that mean it got port scanned 16 times? It can't as i'm sure it got port scanned many more times than that.
or
Does that mean it got infected 16 times? It can't because they said it survived all attacks.
So what on earth were these attacks?
While I agree that it might have been instructive to include, say, RedHat 7 in the lineup, security of original XP is still an important consideration. First, to hear MS at the time, XP-SP1 should have been more solid then and should be more solid now. But far more importantly, we see how vital it is to fully patch your XP system before connecting it to the internet. And where do I get those patches from? Oops...
The catch-22 is that time-to-infection is much shorter than time-to-patch for Windows XP, even with a contemporary internet connection. If you don't have SP2 media, and don't have some other means of (manually) acquiring the latest patches, you're dead in the water. Yes, there are workarounds; you can install some ice of your own before you connect, for that matter, but that obviates all the really neat security features of SP2 with a 3rd-party solution. "Not the solution he had in mind..."
Admittedly, part of this is due to the fact that Windows is "productized", i.e. you have a box containing Windows and you can add patches. With Linux operating systems I think there's a lot more sensitivity to versioning and awareness of granularity; you aren't working on this monolithic thing in need of repair but on a collection of components which can be individually upgraded. Partly psychological, yes, but you also have the advantage of simply leaving out "risky" components until you can get everything up to date. You can run a Linux OS with no services, nothing particularly visible except the interface you're downloading updates through. That's not an option with Windows.
"There are hundreds of game theorists at the gates, sir, and they want to hold an election!"
I agree that this is a secure thing. The problem is, nowhere does it tell a novice user that you should enable the firewall, connect to the net then, download patches, then you're secure
The problem with the security is not that the machine can never be made secure, but that it starts out as a terribly insecure product. This is a problem. Most users are out of the box users. They have no understanding, so they don't know about the firewal etc.. They're told by MS that for security they need to patch using windows update. The point above is that this isn't actually that secure, and while this is happening a compromise can take place.
The main issue here is the slack standards Microsoft use to get their products out the door, and their trade off of complexity to security. They are scared of treating their customers with intelligence, and educating them correctly about the actual process of securing and methods of attack (not necessarily at too technical a level) so good practices are used. For fear of confusing the users the XP SP1 firewall is off, and it's not the only software that has all the security off by default.
If normal users understood that direct connections to the net were bad, they'd all buy routers, they'd consider firewalls, probably ones configured to block all but MSN, E-mail and web access, and we'd live in a considerably more worm free world.
The OS may be securable, but it is not secure by default!. That is the problem, because most users don't do anything but the default (hence Explorer's 90% market share)