Practical Linux home security

By David M Williams
Sunday, 25 May 2008 14:46

Opinion and Analysis

Most all modern home computer users are switched on to the fact they have to protect their computer from nasties: anti-virus, anti-spam, firewalls have all entered the common vernacular. If you don’t use 'that' operating system from Redmond though does this still apply? And what packages should you use?

The short answer is yes, computer security is everyone’s responsibility.  Ok, the case can be made that if your computer is used for a dedicated purpose and does not interact with a network or have any other connections made to it and it does not ever read any floppy disks or CDs or other media that it need not run any such applications.

However, such a computer would most likely be found as a back office financials system or running specialised scientific software in a laboratory. You most definitely wouldn’t be using it to read e-mail, browse the web, read iTWire or do your banking.

For those computers more prudence is required. We all know Microsoft Windows attracts virus writers and malware like faeces attracts flies whereas Linux users rarely get engaged in any debate on whether one anti-virus system is too bloated compared to another.

Indeed, some banks have even been looking into Linux Live CDs for their customers to use. In this circumstance, Internet banking users would boot their computer from the Linux CD and then perform their online banking within a Linux environment. If you already use Linux then this is not really necessary, but it is a testament to the perception of the security and safety Linux offers end users over Microsoft Windows.

This perception is just: just check out the different nature of results when you Google “Windows virus outbreak” vs “Linux virus outbreak.” The Windows results talk about new virus attacks on business networks, and massive virus outbreaks and eye-witness accounts and how most blue screens of death are virus and malware related. The Linux results instead talk about different anti-virus products available, generally mentioning the word “outbreak” in the context “there has been lots of virus outbreaks in the news” and articles that offer advice why Linux is better than Windows for protecting yourself from viruses. There’s no actual article online I could find that spoke of any major virus outbreak affecting Linux computers.

There are some good reasons for this. Microsoft defenders will point out that Windows has a higher payload for virus writers because it is used by so many more people. This argument is simple sophistry which masks the truth of the situation. The reality is Linux is secure by default and Linux users are conditioned to work in a very sensible and secure manner. Most notably is the fact that Linux users rarely ever log in as the root super-user. This means even if a malicious program was executed it could not corrupt any system files. It can not delete system files. It can not cause any new service to load and run automatically on start up.

Yet, even so, anti-virus on Linux can be a good idea. I’ll tell you why.

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