Tony Arnold wrote: > Peter, > > Peter Adam Kelly wrote: > >> I was thinking this morning (which is quite exceptional for me at such >> an early hour, but that's another story haha) that a large distro user >> base like ubuntu's is great, it standardizes things and all that, but I >> was left wondering maybe having so many people using one distro makes >> the user base more seseptable to virusses or mallicious attacks, is the >> none standardisation in gnu linux a good thing in security terms and >> standization a bad thing? > > It's generally agreed that a homogeneous environment is bad from a > security viewpoint because it means that if one machine is compromised > then it's likely all of them will or could be. Having a variety of > machines can help limit the scope of the effects of a compromise. > > There are a number of reasons why Linux has not be hit by viruses in the > same way that Windows has. The main one, IMHO, is that files are not > executable by default and so an attacker has to work that little bit > harder to get a user to run something malicious.
>The other is that users [in Ubuntu, unlike typical Windows users,] > tend [NOT] >to be logged in as root all the time, so it's much harder to > compromise system files, although some argue the users' data is still > vulnerable which is much more valuable than the system stuff. ?typo? -- alan cocks Ubuntu user -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
