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The Birth and Battle of Conficker
NewScientist has an interesting look back at the birth of the Conficker worm and how this sophisticated monster quickly grew to such power and infamy. "Since that flurry of activity in early April, all has been uneasily quiet on the Conficker front. In some senses, that marks a victory for the criminals. The zombie network is now established and being used for its intended purpose: to make money. Through its peer-to-peer capabilities, the worm can be updated on the infected network at any time. It is not an unprecedented situation. There are several other large networks of machines infected with malicious software. Conficker has simply joined the list. The security community will continue to fight them, but as long as the worm remains embedded in any computer there can be no quick fixes."
If your ISP provided a free service where it would text or phone you and offer to help clean up your systems if it detected malware-ish behavior coming from your computer or network, would you sign up?
The only gotcha is that you would be inviting the ISP to watch your traffic.
OK, this is slashdot, so most people would say "no," but how many regular people would say "yes" and would that make much of a difference?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There are more than you think. Old home computers are quickly becoming Linux computers.
There are a lot of independent techs out there who service the lion's share of home computers. Yes, Best Buy and the like get a lot, too. But they can't compete on quality service with the little guy (due to overhead), so they have to keep themselves going through quantity.
I know a handful "home computer techs" - people who work out of their house or have a small one-room office somewhere. They're making ends meet and keeping their families going by doing this while at the same time putting linux on computers that are only mildly useful for anything beyond XP (and sometimes even XP, eg. 256Mb RAM).
More often than not, the system is in need of a reinstall anyway due to some combination of users messing them up and malware. It's like scoring a 3-pointer at the buzzer, in terms of removing an infection vector.
I'm one such person, while I'm unemployed. I'd say maybe one out of 5 of the computers that come to me leave with Linux installed. Those satisfied customers then refer their friends and family. Not much repeat service, but quite a few referrals. It would also appear that people are oddly appreciative for preventing them from installing all that crap as well - "it just works nice and fast and there are no pop-ups".
Not only that, but when someone upgrades their computer (and they've got the proclivity to tinker) they'll do something with the old one. Linux has picked up a lot of mindshare, and I know many of the so called "tech savvy" types (who still need someone who knows what they're doing on occasion when they can't recover or get stuck) are doing this.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
My God! It's full of anti-worms.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
sure linux has mindshare, but that hasn't translated into market share. The year of the linux desktop will also be the year of the linux virus.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'm one such person, while I'm unemployed. I'd say maybe one out of 5 of the computers that come to me leave with Linux installed. Those satisfied customers then refer their friends and family. Not much repeat service, but quite a few referrals.
What percentage of those users are still using Linux in 1 month? In 6 months? After 1 year? Per usual, something about your allegedly genuine pro-Linux story just begs more questions. How many users later dump the machine and end up just getting a new Windows machine instead? How many gain a new found appreciation for Windows after having used Linux for any length of time? How many users ever come back complaining that their X server is crashing or sound latency problems make watching YouTube unbearable? Even the most sophisticated user will have problems with Linux or find it not to their liking, yet these "regular people" seem to be happy as a pig in feces. You aren't telling us the full story, on purpose.
We now have Windows Defender. MS should know every nook and cranny in MS Window. What is so special about Conficker that the best software company in the world can't protect it's user against a well known and defined threat. I realize that dumb users will often just go back and reinfect the computer, but then we would expect defender to block the reinstall.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
What I thought was interesting was the internet telescope mentioned in the article. No wonder we're running out of IPv4 addresses, someone's wasting millions of them!
In my experience 100% of the people I have volunteered to install Linux on their systems not only continue to use linux for years afterwords, bring me their new computers they buy with windows installed and ask me to remove it.
Among others:
dozens of first time to almost completely computer illiterate people.
Lots of people that have been using windows for years and are fed up with the crap, especially after most linux distros had more in common with windows xp than vista had in common with windows xp.
At least half dozen people over 60.
Lots and lots of teenagers.
Not to mention everyone that works in my office never seen a linux computer before they walked through the door, and now have them at home.
So, these arguments are for the ignorant that have not used a major distro in the last couple years.
Living in Chile
Considering the number of high value Linux targets out there, you'd be very very wrong that people are not trying to generate systemic Linux hacks so they can make their filthy lucre.
As a computer consultant that (has to) advocate Windows, allow me to answer this.
The average computer user in a company doesn't know jack about his machine. Fortunately, he's not required to do administrative tasks, but he's required to work with it. And he's required to produce. Trying to convince management that they should toss out all Windows machines and install Linux everywhere is something you should only try if you always wanted to take over bolder duty from Sisyphos.
Second, the average computer administrator in a company doesn't know jack about Linux. Why? Because he was hired to administrate Windows machines. More often that not, he can only do that, too, because Windows offers an easy to use GUI that forgives a lot of errors and asks at least 10 times before you can break something. If you hand these people Linux servers, you're opening a can of worms. No pun intended. They can, maybe, keep a Windows environment halfway stable and secure if you hand them the right tools and a good explanation how to use them. At least 'til you come the next time.
If you press them into Linux, you will come back to Linux boxes that have been crowbared open because "else it didn't work".
And, bluntly, security-wise I prefer a fairly well secured Windows server environment to completely insecure Linux boxes. Insecure, not because the system wouldn't allow it, but because the administrator is completely overtaxed by the task of securing them.
Yes, hiring another admin would be a good idea. Try rolling that bolder towards management, please.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have a friend who installed Ubuntu on his machine and was actually quite happy with it. He searched google for basic information and was able to get xine up and running to watch dvd movies on his 32 inch monitor connected to the pc. He was extremely happy that he no longer had to worry about viruses.
One day he called me frantically complaining about the inability to login because the system refused to accept his password. After calming him down, I found out that he had a second account called .... test. The password was also ... test.
Well we logged into test-test and did a sudo to root (which didn't require a password becuase test was properly configured in the sudoers file) then changed his normal account's password.
He was happy again.
Later I was able to look at the auth logs... and just as I suspected.... someone logged in using test-test from the net using ssh then changed his other account's password. (He has a cable modem and no NAT set up)
The ubuntu default firewall is ok..... but cannot prevent bad things from happening to people that creates accounts called test / password test.
And that is my biggest fear with linux going mainstream. People like that will quickly give linux a bad name when the year of the Linux desktop arrives.