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The Desktop Security Battle May Be Lost
Trailrunner7 writes in with a Threatpost.com article that begins: "For years, security experts, analysts and even users have been lamenting the state of desktop security. Viruses, spam, Trojans and rootkits have added up to create an ugly picture. But, the good news is that the desktop security battle may be over. The less-than-good news, however, is that we may have lost it. Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, said Thursday that many organizations, particularly in the financial services industry, have gotten to the point of assuming that their customers' desktops are compromised. And moving forward from that assumption, things don't get much prettier." It goes on to speculate about home routers being targeted and infected.
If you'd have read the article, you'd know that home networks are the new frontier for hackers and a big reason why security experts are giving up the desktop fight to focus on the network instead. From the article: "... it won’t matter if PCs are disinfected, swapped out, or replaced with iPads, the bad guys are still control because they own the network below." So the old Blame Windows standard won't work in this case.
Other countries seem to be realizing that's it's a much more winnable battle if home users aren't in an MS environment. Isn't this EXACTLY why the Canadian bank recently started handing out Linux Live Boot CDs for their customers to use when banking from home?
I think this is the article http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/03/25/2350236/Can-Ubuntu-Save-Online-Banking
Telus gave us this really crappy DSL/Wireless router. I never changed the admin password (admin/telus) on it, but I put a wireless password on it.
To quote the Mythbusters, "Well there's your problem!"
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
The article states "These are all reasonable assumptions based on real-world attacks that have been going on for some time now. Attackers have been targeting home networking equipment for a couple of years, using a combination of vulnerabilities in the firmware and hardware to get control of home users' outbound Internet traffic". Links within the original blog post discuss botnets that are already attacking Linux-based routers
There's nothing "hypothetical" about this threat.
I don't generally post this kind of thing, but please mod the parent up. I cannot stress enough how false assumptions are generally bad in terms of security. Yes, Linux is being attacked (successfully), as is Mac OSX. The attacks on home routers are particularly heinous as most people do not update/upgrade the firmware ever, and more of it is based on common Linux underpinnings.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info