Re: [school-discuss] Linux security fears fanned in press

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002 00:03, David Bucknell wrote:
> A friend sent me this piece in Edupage citing a ZDnet article saying
> "successful" attacks on Linux were up in the first six months of the year
> (up 20 percent) while those on MS were down the same amount. They don't
> mention the difference in the kind of attack. I'll copy the article here
> for you. What do you think the best way to respond to this type of press is
> (besides applying patches to known holes, of course ;-0)

There are now many more Linux machines to attack, and the figures are `drawing 
a long bow' from the data available.

They also haven't defined `successful'. Killing your DNS doesn't have the same 
impact as a CodeRed infection.

The article also doesn't mention that practically all of the extra attacks are 
due to one single group of crackers, which leads one to wonder if they're 
being helped in any way by enemies of Linux? There is another big difference 
between random attacks and deliberate ones.

The easy answer is: *use* the automatic updating software supplied with your 
distro, and wait for this one group of crackers to get bored.

Cheers; Leon