Slashdot Mirror
How Security Experts Are Protecting Their Own Data (siliconvalley.com)
Today the San Jose Mercury News asked several prominent security experts which security products they were actually using for their own data. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
The EFF's chief technologist revealed that he doesn't run an anti-virus program, partly because he's using Linux, and partly because he feels anti-virus software creates a false sense of security. ("I don't like to get complacent and rely on it in any way...") He does regularly encrypt his e-mail, "but he doesn't recommend that average users scramble their email, because he thinks the encryption software is just too difficult to use."
The newspaper also interviewed security expert Eugene Spafford, who rarely updates the operating system on one of his computers -- because it's not connected to the internet -- and sometimes even accesses his files with a virtual machine, which he then deletes when he's done. His home router is equipped with a firewall device, and "he's developed some tools in his research center that he uses to try to detect security problems," according to the article. "There are some additional things I do," Spafford added, telling the reporter that "I'm not going to give details of all of them, because that doesn't help me."
Bruce Schneier had a similar answer. When the reporter asked how he protected his data, Schneier wouldn't tell them, adding "I'm kind of a target..."
The newspaper also interviewed security expert Eugene Spafford, who rarely updates the operating system on one of his computers -- because it's not connected to the internet -- and sometimes even accesses his files with a virtual machine, which he then deletes when he's done. His home router is equipped with a firewall device, and "he's developed some tools in his research center that he uses to try to detect security problems," according to the article. "There are some additional things I do," Spafford added, telling the reporter that "I'm not going to give details of all of them, because that doesn't help me."
Bruce Schneier had a similar answer. When the reporter asked how he protected his data, Schneier wouldn't tell them, adding "I'm kind of a target..."
If he did -nothing- about security, that would be true. That's not likely the case. More likely, he's using protective strategies that are appropriate for his environment and the threats most prevalent in that environment. The most common threats for Linux machines aren't viruses. Viruses specifically are more of a Windows thing. Not that there are no threats that affect Linux, they are -different- threats.
On Linux, he may use the firewall, Tripwire or another IDS, some form of IPS if only fail2ban, SELinux, etc. Also of course browser-specific things like an adblocker and NoScript. Linux has long had good support for good partition and file encryption, so he might use that, and scheduled offsite pull backups protect against ransomware.
ClamAV runs -on- Linux, but normally -for- Windows - you install on on your Linux mail server to remove viruses before your Windows clients download their mail, etc.
Just because Linux doesn't have as many viruses for it, doesn't mean it's immune to viruses. In fact, Linux probably a very popular carrier for viruses - Linux host gets broken in (usually via a PHP exploit) and some files are dropped onto it and files modified so whenever a Windows host accesses it, it obtains the payload and gets infected.
Linux may not be harmed by it, but it certainly is an active participant in the propagation of viruses. Mostly because the malware authors want to target users, and 90% of them run Windows. But they can't target Windows servers, because 75% of the servers out there run Linux. So they will exploit those Linux-running servers to plant some WIndows malware on there so the Linux host distributes the Windows malware to everyone.
Linux is a carrier, and perhaps having an anti-virus may be handy if nothing more than to ensure that you're not being part of the problem and serving up stuff that infects other users. The best part is, these scanners need not be intrusive since the host can be assumed to be free of malware, so you're really just looking for bad files.
Same thing on MacOS - there's no reason to have a antivirus scanner other than to make sure you're not serving up infected files, or to alert you in case you get an email that won't infect you, but may infect someone else if you forward it on or something.
Google, for example, scans emails and documents for viruses and other malware, not because they can infect Google, but to prevent spread.
The most insidious viruses aren't obvious. They hide their presence in the background, taking your personal information and your data, silently sending it to who-knows-where while not alerting you to their presence. If the malware responsible for data breaches announced its presence, data breaches would be a lot less common and would be stopped quickly. You could correctly say you've never known yourself to be infected with malware. However, your arrogance about the matter leads me to seriously doubt whether you've truly not been compromised.
In terms of Linux, it's not classical security through obscurity, it's security through diversity. One of the reasons Slammer was so painful a decade ago was that most institutions had a Windows monoculture. The time between one machine being infected on your network and every machine on your network being infected was about 10 minutes (a fresh Windows install on the network was compromised before it finished running Windows Update for the first time). If you'd had a network that was 50% Windows and 50% something else, then it would only have infected half of your infrastructure and you'd have been able to pull the plug on the Windows machines and start recovery. It's possible to write cross-platform malware, but it's a lot harder (though there's some fun stuff out of one of the recent DARPA programs writing exploit code that is valid x86 and ARM code, relying on encodings that are nops in one and valid in the other, interspersed with the converse). Writing malware that can attack half a dozen combinations of OS and application software is difficult.
This is why Verisign's root DNS runs 50% Linux, 50% FreeBSD and of those they run two or three userland DNS servers, so an attack on a particular OS or particular DNS server will only take out (at most) half of the machines. Even an attack on an OS combined with an independent attack on the DNS server will still leave them with about a quarter functional, which will result in a bit more latency for Internet users, but leave them functioning.
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