| Protect those networked desktops! |
Feb. 17, 2006
Do you want to put the fear of God into a Windows-using friend, and get them to switch to Linux?
If you do, you could do far worse than to point them at the excellent story in the Washington Post, "Invasion of the Computer Snatchers," by Brian Krebs. In this story, Krebs spells out how modern crackers use naïve Windows users and the Internet every day to set up vast botnets that deliver dozens of spyware programs on thousands of PCs.
It's an ugly story, but it's also a well-told one.
Those of us in the business already know about botnets. Well, we should know about them. In the tale, one security expert, who chases down botnets, recounts how he called one large company to tell them that they had 10,000 infected Windows PCs. The network administrator didn't have a clue as to what to do about them.
Doesn't that say it all? It's not just clueless families who let their "included in the box" Symantec Anti-Virus subscriptions run out that become unwitting victims and participants of adware and spyware botnets. It's also businesses, big businesses.
Their mistake? Using Windows on the desktop without adequate protective measures.
It doesn't take much to stop the common botnet. The instructions, Krebs gives in another small article, "Don't Let Your Computer Be Hijacked," are enough to stop 99 percent of attacks.
The only security basic I'd add to his list is to set your firewall to stop all traffic except for the necessary services such as the Web and email.
But, here's the telling point. If people were running Linux, they'd stop 100 percent of all known attacks and they wouldn't have to know or do anything!
Now, eventually there will be, I'm sure, significant attacks against Linux. You know what, though? Today is not that day.
Today, using a Windows machine on the Internet, unless you know exactly what you're doing, is just asking to have your system hijacked. Today, Linux or BSD Unix-powered Mac OS X, are the smart choices for anyone who wants their computer, bank and credit card accounts, and neighbors, to be safe.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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