* More reader comments regarding mi2g's study
Today, we’re presenting more reader comments regarding last week’s newsletter about mi2g’s study. The study found Linux to be the most-attacked operating system for PCs attached to the Internet. While the research firm showed Linux was the operating system in 65% of the 240,000 hacking incidents it studied, this figure did not bear out with readers’ actual experiences.
Today, we’re presenting more reader comments regarding last week’s newsletter about mi2g’s study. The study found Linux to be the most-attacked operating system for PCs attached to the Internet. While the research firm showed Linux was the operating system in 65% of the 240,000 hacking incidents it studied, this figure did not bear out with readers’ actual experiences.
“I have been using Linux since fall 1997 as my only desktop,” said one reader. “I have not had a single instance of anyone getting into this machine. Under no circumstances is Linux anywhere near as open as [Microsoft Windows] to be infiltrated by hackers.”
Another reader wrote: “I’ve used Linux since 1995, with no breaches. Of course, that may be due to updates, patches, and an external hardware firewall. As for my home Windows computers, I can’t say that – [it’s] more like a couple-of-thousand times, if you count ad-ware, viruses, and worm attacks. I’m not trying to discount the report in your article, just putting emphasis on patching and firewall updates … but, I think you already did that.”
Other readers had similar thoughts about the issues of patching and updating Linux for security reasons.
“I appreciated your Linux breach read, especially since my wife’s laptop hard drive suddenly became inoperable yesterday. I gave her a laptop without patching my old SuSE 9.0.”
But another reader said the issue goes beyond just patching and updating software.
“I’m going to stick my neck out and say that it isn’t even patching or updating the software that matters most – it’s configuring your firewall and services correctly to begin with,” this person wrote. “When we first setup our Linux server, we used a very helpful book titled ‘Hacking Linux Exposed,’ which gave an awful lot of info on what to do and why. Without information of that caliber our server would have been a zombie within a week, patches or no patches.”
Sound advice (if not a free plug for “Hacking Linux Exposed”).
