Dr Sinitsyn’s Administeria

Dr Valentine Sinitsyn presents esoteric system administration goodness from the impenetrable bowels of the server room.

Remember when you first tried to convert a Windows user to Linux? Which arguments did you use then? Perhaps you told them it’s free. This rarely works out in my experience: many users have already paid for Windows (either via the system it came happily pre-installed on or for a licence directly) and they’re not going to get a refund even if they move to Linux. So you quickly resort to the next argument: Linux is secure, and there are no viruses for it.

Unfortunately, this isn’t entirely true. When Linux is configured correctly it’s secure, yet not impregnable − and the latter is what your Windows user would probably hear. A false sense of security is worse than no security at all, and that’s the problem. We convince people that Linux is secure, period. But if they always work as root to save some sudo typing, or if they don’t care about upgrades, or if they run an outdated distro because they love KDE 3 so much, they’re in trouble. There’s malware that targets Linux, and the tool we discuss in this Administeria, osquery, even provides a pack to capture common infection signatures. There are also rootkits that are difficult to find. There are packages with backdoors. There are enough threats in the world for you to treat security seriously.

One day I discovered my Linux box was serving spam. A short investigation revealed it had a guest:guest account, which was rather trivial to hack. Why was I so careless to choose a weak password? The server was behind a firewall so I wanted something easy to remember for the account my teammates used to push files to me. Things went fine until another guy in the team decided to forward an SSH port to this box to push his files from the outside...

Remember that Linux is only secure because it has the right tools for you to protect it, and yourself.