[ubuntu-uk] linux & viruses

[alan c]

Tony Arnold wrote:
> Peter,
> 
> Peter Adam Kelly wrote:
> 
>> I was thinking this morning (which is quite exceptional for me at such
>> an early hour, but that's another story haha) that a large distro user
>> base like ubuntu's is great, it standardizes things and all that, but I
>> was left wondering maybe having so many people using one distro makes
>> the user base more seseptable to virusses or mallicious attacks, is the
>> none standardisation in gnu linux a good thing in security terms and
>> standization a bad thing?
> 
> It's generally agreed that a homogeneous environment is bad from a
> security viewpoint because it means that if one machine is compromised
> then it's likely all of them will or could be. Having a variety of
> machines can help limit the scope of the effects of a compromise.
> 
> There are a number of reasons why Linux has not be hit by viruses in the
> same way that Windows has. The main one, IMHO, is that files are not
> executable by default and so an attacker has to work that little bit
> harder to get a user to run something malicious. 


>The other is that users

[in Ubuntu, unlike typical Windows users,]

> tend 

[NOT]

>to be logged in as root all the time, so it's much harder to
> compromise system files, although some argue the users' data is still
> vulnerable which is much more valuable than the system stuff.

?typo?

-- 
alan cocks
Ubuntu user