[ale] Linux Distributions

Michael B. Trausch fd0man at gmail.com
Tue May 17 22:43:01 EDT 2005


Geoffrey wrote:
> 
> There is no defense when it comes to XP as the first user created is
> root by default, and there is no indicator that this is the case.  Since
> the majority of XP machines are one user machines, the majority of them
> are in fact running as root.
> 

Which is precisely the reason that the Windows systems on the Internet
are the ones that are vunerable and spread vunerabilities.  It's not
data that people are after, it's the machine itself.  Be it for
processing power, storage, whatever, in the world of the personal user,
it's not the data that matters.

In the world of corporations, it's data that they want, and yet they
still get to it, many times, because of something they knew that the SA
didn't.

XP machines should have users, but again, the current releases of
Windows are broken enough that you can do *NOTHING* as a user, not even
install a program in your own home directory in your profile, as you can
in the UNIX world, provided that you get a static binary or a C
compiler, and your /home partition is not noexec.

I've heard that Microsoft is claiming to follow a more Unix-like
permissions strategy, however, I've not verified the authenticity of
that information myself yet, so I consider it to be a rumor.  However, I
think it could be useful.

	- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                               <fd0man at gmail.com>
Website: http://fd0man.chadeux.net/     Jabber: mtrausch at jabber.com
Phone: +1-(678)-522-7934              FAX (US Only): 1-866-806-4647
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