- Greed, politics, and CanSecWest
- Windows Search 4.0 preview: first impressions
- Is Microsoft artificially delaying XP SP3?
- The six month *nix itch: How should I scratch it?
- You can never have too many cores
- Was Vista DOA?
- Windows "Workstation" 2008 results lead to backlash from Vista zealots
- Windows "Workstation" 2008: One week later
- Windows "Workstation" 2008 Clobbers Vista in Benchmark Testing
- Microsoft owns up to Vista's flaws (sort of)
November 08, 2007 | Comments: (0) | TrackBacks: (0)
The Ubuntu Plunge - Day 3: Epiphany!
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the web this morning. I had justed booted back into Vista x64 to check on a couple of schedule items when I noticed an alert coming from Windows Defender. It seems that the anti-spyware utility had been unable to download new malware definitions for over a week. It also noted what it believed to be some “suspicious” behavior on the part of a particular executable.
So, naturally, I did what most veteran (i.e. been burned before) Windows users do when faced with a potential malware infection: Panic! How could this have happened? It's a nearly fresh (2 weeks old) install of Vista! I've got UAC enabled and all the security patches in place! I even installed the SP1 Beta!
When the panic attack was over I began scouring the web for references to the executable in question. When several leads pointed to potential spyware, I decided to pull out all the stops and download the “gold standard” of anti-malware solutions: SpyBot Search and Destroy.
An hour or so of scanning and I was presented with a clean bill of health. Whatever was tripping-up Windows Defender was apparently harmless, and the various definitions errors and other false alarms I had experienced were unrelated to any actual infection. I was out of the woods. My Vista PC would live to see another day!
Then it hit me: had just wasted over an hour of my life chasing down a phantom malware infection. It was a disturbing sensation, more so since I hadn't experienced anything like it in several days...ever since I started my odyssey into Linux-land.
To the Linux faithful: You must understand that, for us Windows users, fear is an accepted part of the Microsoft experience. We enable UAC and Internet Explorer Protected Mode. We meticulously maintain our anti-spyware and anti-virus definitions (and quake visibly when they become out of date). And more importantly, we never, ever open an email attachment from someone we don't know (and even when we do trust the sender, we cringe with each mouse click).
As for other tasks, like downloading files from the Web, it's all about the source: Have you downloaded from there before? Can they be trusted? What about user comments? Have other poor saps reported malware on the site? Itching to try some shiny new application or utility? You know, just to “kick the tires?” Not without a thorough background check! Anything less is just crazy talk!
To be fair, Windows is such a huge target because...well...it's everywhere. It's on your soccer mom neighbor's home computer. The one she manages the family finances on. The one that has all those juicy online banking shortcuts and stored passwords just waiting to be socially engineered into some shady character's greedy little hands.
However, Windows is also a target because it's riddled with holes, most of which Microsoft drilled itself during its epic quest to destroy Netscape nearly a decade ago. And as I note in my upcoming feature article on the future of the “fat client” desktop, we've been living with the insecurity fallout ever since.
Case in point: UAC. It's a response to problems that Microsoft itself created. And while the company has grown more serious about security in recent years, it can never stuff the genie fully back into the bottle. To do so would break way to many applications – it would kill the platform overnight.
So as I sit here typing away at this missive in OpenOfficeWriter, all the while admiring my latest Compiz theme find (“t-ish” sure is a sweet looker), I can't help but think of all the things I'm missing since booting back into my “Gutsy Gibbon” install: spyware; viruses; and (most importantly) fear.
Next Up: My one week summary and a critical decision point is reached...stay tuned!
Posted by Randall Kennedy on November 8, 2007 01:53 AM
RATE THIS ARTICLE:
-
- COMMENTS
In response to:
"To be fair, Windows is such a huge target because...well...it's everywhere"
read this:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/10/18/1097951615940.html
A common misconception is that a popular platform such as Windows attracts more than its fair share of malware and security exploitations. Let's show that this premise is wrong once and for all by way of a counter-example: the open-source Apache web server has more than triple the market share of Microsoft's IIS yet has had far fewer problems with security vulnerabilities and associated malware over the years.
Posted by: Sly Coder at November 8, 2007 02:46 AMI faced a kind of security problem when installed Vista on my PC. When I was running XP I should say that I felt quite safe, my Symantec IS was kept up-to-date, besides I had PrivacyKeyboard ( a specialized anti-keylogging tool) installed. I do not feel secure now as the version of PrivacyKeyboard compatible with Vista is still under development and I'm not able to find an equal solution.
Posted by: Bart at November 8, 2007 04:03 AM"To the Linux faithful: You must understand that, for us Windows users, fear is an accepted part of the Microsoft experience."
The ranks of the 'Linux faithful' have swollen with Windows refugees at an increasing rate over the last few years. I have not forgotten the intense paranoia of living with Windows; the virus scans, the malware sweeps, Patch Tuesdays. After I discovered Ubuntu and played with it a while on a spare machine, I eventually started dual-booting. One day I realized that literally the only things I was doing in Windows was running Google Earth and doing updates; I was doing everything else in Ubuntu. When Google released Earth for Linux in mid-June 2006, that was the point I left Windows never to return...
Posted by: Limulus at November 8, 2007 04:23 AMFrom a Ubunutu & Mac user...
I think fear is still a useful trait for a person to have. Note the recent trojan infecting Macs. One has to actively click on a button in order to download a (supposed) codec. A fearless person, thinking that their Mac is invulnerable, would do so. A fearful person would not. Ditto with Linux systems -- keep up the firewall, don't download software from unknown locations, and keep your system up-to-date. Note that one nice item about Ubuntu is the easy updating with a reminder notice.
I'll agree that Linux is less vulnerable than Windows but it isn't invulnerable. Fear is good.
Posted by: Rick Westerman at November 8, 2007 04:59 AMGotta agree with Rick Westerman here. It's wonderful that Ubuntu has such a good safety record -- and with AppArmor in place and SELinux on the horizon, it just keeps getting safer. However, Ubuntu users should never assume that the problems of Windows-land can never affect them!
Posted by: Ryan at November 8, 2007 10:00 AMYeah, before we start selling Linux as secure, you might want to think twice. There's no real proactive security in Linux. For that you need to go to something like SELinux, or OpenBSD.
And I'm sorry, but it DOES matter how many systems are available in the wild. The destroyers and opportunists of the world look for the easy, and profitable, score.
This is a product of how many of a particular system are running, multiplied by the number of security vulnerabilities there are on those systems, multiplied yet again by the value that can be gained by compromising those systems. You should probably divide by the risk of being caught too.
I have to agree with you that one of the reasons that Linux as a desktop operating system today is more secure than Windows is because it is not targeted by attackers as Windows. But would still be more secure if it was more targeted than Windows? Probably the apache vs IIS has the answer...
