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On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 14:18 +0100, Jonathan West wrote:
> No platform is completely immune to attack, and while you might feel that
> moving to the Mac or Unix because they are less of a target than Windows
> because they are less popular, "security by obcurity" is not all that much
> of a guarantee, especially if their popularity increases. You will probably
> be better off ensuring that you have a well-designed security and backup
> regime for your Windows system.
The relatively better security on Mac or UNIX-like systems has nothing
to do with obscurity. Iif you think in terms of servers, UNIX has been a
prime target for attacks for quite some time.
Rather, the difference has more to do with an emphasis on security
architecture than preventative measures.
Because Windows was originally designed with no security in mind, when
worrying about security in Windows, most people focus on prevention.
Your own advice is a good example of that. While all the advice you gave
was very sound, because of your Windows-based perspective, you left out
something very basic on UNIX-like systems: working in an everyday
account with limited privileges. Windows has such accounts, but, given
the Windows perspective on prevention and general emphasis on
convenience, many Windows users are hardly aware of them.
This practice alone is a good answer to the claim that UNIX-like systems
will become more of a target as their popularity increases. If you limit
your use of the root account on a UNIX-like system to absolute
essentials, then the damage that any attack can do is limited to your
personal files, not to the system. Increased popularity won't change
that. This single example can be multiplied dozens of times over in
almost every aspect of the operating system.
Admittedly, some UNIX-like systems have relaxed security considerably in
the hopes of becoming more attractive to Windows users. Fedora Core 3,
for example, is noticeably less secure than its predecssor Red Hat 7 if
you do a default install. Still, the fact remains that UNIX-like systems
are designed for security from the ground up, while Windows systems are
not. That means that it is still far easier to build a secure system
from the ground up using UNIX-like operating systems than it is using
any currently available version of Windows.
If you have no experience, naturally there is a steep learning curve in
securing UNIX-like systems. Among other things, you probably have a lot
to unlearn from your Windows experience. Still, I note that something
like 80% of system administrators consider UNIX-like systems more secure
than Windows systems -- and they, after all, should know.
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