Way back in 2003, I had a school project partner over to do some work on a project. They had a floppy that was infected with some malicious stuff and had planned to utterly trash my computer with it. I only found out at a later date because some guys were asking me questions about my computer, and someone spilled the beans whenever they realised that my computer wasn’t infected and was indeed still functioning completely fine…
False sense of security. You accidentally downloaded a virus that doesn’t work on your system… What kind of habits and hygiene are you rolling with on a day to day basis?
You guys are quick to forget that Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is, in fact, not an emulator. Most windows ransomware will successfully encrypt your files if ran with wine.
so, I had a pendrive that a friend borrowed once. later on another friend used it and said it had virus. I simply couldn’t know since I was on GNU/Linux.
Of course not. There is a market for investing very little for some cheap malware and then putting it out there, waiting for the small amount of people (out of a billion of desptop users) falling for it. Also you go for the weakest link in defense, so scamming random desktop users is rarely a technical feat. It usually exploits the human, not the system.
But we also all know how money is actually distributed. So millions of random users being scammed for some money is still not the high reward scenario a server is. Much more work is invested there because the rewards are so much higher. And yet even then you often target people as the weak link. System security for a company is mainly user security. Teaching them to not fall for for scams as an entry way to the system. And there are a lot of professionals that basically made this their own social science of how I convey those things the best, how I enforce and regularly refresh those lessons, how to make people stick to best practices.
Are you trying to tell me this all happens in parallel to a technical server structure that actually isn't that safe but rarely exploited because nobody could be bothered to check for vulnerabilities as it's just Linux and the adoption rate is low?
I think you’re right. A single desktop, unless it is either someone in a position of power or access to trade secret files, is not a time effective attack vector.
A server on the other hand can access all of that stuff across an entire organization.
Not just that but whenever you hear that company xyz was hacked and their data leaked, what do you think was powering their servers? Most likely Linux. Sure, they usually have more things exposed to the internet, but users install way more apps so the attack surface is vastly bigger in home computers running Linux than servers.
If you’re feeling even more paranoid, go with something even more obscure like Plan 9 from Bell Labs. It’s Unix-like but differs so much from it that a Unix or Linux type malware would do nothing to it.
It’s a good question what I really want. I’m very satisfied with my current system (NixOS) but in the end it’s still Linux and stuff like the 9P filesystem just intrigues me. So it’s not like I’d need to switch or anything. But a playground to apply the concepts to some problems would be nice. Maybe I’ll try 9front some day and see what I can do with it
Indeed. A fun little project but unfortunately it doesn’t seem ready for any sort of daily use. Driver support (a crucial component) is probably pretty scarce. Their web browsers too are hit-or-miss, with one in particular (Links) that crashes when performing a during Google search.
Still, there are few alternatives that differ substantially from the original ancestral Unix that are available and more should be developed. GNU/Hurd and the BSD’s are the only ones I know of.
Add comment