What protection?

My first ever training in Linux, the guy teaching stood up and said....

"Linux is the best operating system, through the years all the holes have been plugged up"

What a legend :)
I now delete any e-mails i get warning me of any vulnerabilities. :-p
 
Theoretically viruses for Linux are possible. I think some "proof of concept" viruses have been written. As far as I'm aware, though, absolutely nothing has ever been seen in the wild.

You're more likely to be hit by browser exploits or something along those lines, but as long as you always grab security updates as they become available you'll be fine.

In short - don't worry. ;)
 
chkrootkit.
It's not really necessary unless you're running an internet-facing web server but I do it anyway just for peace of mind. :)

Don't need anything else.
 
Isn't the idea that even if somebody went through all the trouble of making a virus for such a small target as linux users, it would be patched in next to no time?
 
Superewza said:
Isn't the idea that even if somebody went through all the trouble of making a virus for such a small target as linux users, it would be patched in next to no time?
Click to expand...

Yeah I guess so, depending on the nature of the virus of course. In all honesty, even though Linux is inherently very secure, I think the main reason there are no viruses is the small market share. What's the point of writing a virus for a difficult-to-penetrate OS that is used by comparitively few, when you could just attack a relatively weaker OS that's used by the majority of the world?
 
Superewza said:
Isn't the idea that even if somebody went through all the trouble of making a virus for such a small target as linux users, it would be patched in next to no time?
Click to expand...

Well, yes. But hackers/crackers are wise to this and write stuff that is fairly hard to detect, hence rootkits.
It's actually a bigger problem than you'd think in the Linux server share. I read on reg a while back about a hacking group that had their rootkit running on a good hundred or so compromised servers. Nobody noticed until somebody tried to work out why some web servers were trying to exploit some of their visitors. I seem to recall the rootkits had been on some of the servers for a good few months.
But for desktop use, it's really not worth worrying about. As Huw said, why would they bother?
 
don't bother with an antivirus in linux, its going to cramp your style and hog up resources for no reason. There free, Avast, ClamAV and kaspersky, hmmm wonder why. The only justification for having an antivirus in Linux is if you dual boot Windows, that way you can scan windows from inside Linux :-) and remove any STD's!! from surfing pron!

Firewall wise, there was FireStarter but thats no longer maintained. IP-tables would do, not hard to configure, just bloody annoying to reload list after every edit. Though recently redhat announced new dynamic firewall on fedora (http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/05/21/204207/Linux-Gets-Dynamic-Firewalls-In-Fedora-15) no more annoying reloads..., would love to port that to an ebuild for gentoo
 
I always thought Guarddog was pretty good as a firewall front-end...years ago, when I used to care! With pretty much everyone having a router these days, do we even need to worry about software firewalls?
 
Showboat said:
My first ever training in Linux, the guy teaching stood up and said....

"Linux is the best operating system, through the years all the holes have been plugged up"

What a legend :)
I now delete any e-mails i get warning me of any vulnerabilities. :-p
Click to expand...

Hmmm....I can't detect any sarcasm in that but I so hope it was meant sarcastically because it's quite possible the stupidest thing I've ever heard in relation to Linux security.

If a 'trainer' had said that to me once I'd stopped literally ROFLing I would have walked out.

That would be true is Linux was "completed" and the code for the kernel and all the libs had not been touched in years but it ignores the near constant code churn that goes on.
 
Superewza said:
Isn't the idea that even if somebody went through all the trouble of making a virus for such a small target as linux users, it would be patched in next to no time?
Click to expand...
Two things:

a) Linux is by no means a "small target"; a majority of web servers run linux;

b) As far as speed of patching is concerned, there's no reason to believe linux being open source would necessarily mean quicker patching. If a vulnerability were exposed in Windows, for example, Microsoft have far more resources and centralised expertise to throw at the problem.

One could just as easily argue that linux being open source in the first instance presents a significant security risk.
 
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