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Posted by tadelste on Nov 8, 2005 7:18 AM · 2 comments LXer.com; By Tom Adelstein
You might think that the sky is falling the way the media has gone on a feeding frenzy related to a Linux worm. Sorry to disappoint you, but the worm will hardly affect the user base. It's not like the "Code Red" worm which self-replicated malicious code that exploited a known vulnerability in Microsoft IIS servers (CA-2001-13). Rumor has it, Wal-Mart didn't cope with it very well.
Exploit.Linux. and Small.x have put some excitement into the world of anti-virus companies. Suddenly, people might get scared and buy anti-virus offerings. But in the circles where Linux folks run, it doesn't even warrant a shoulder shrug.
One of readers writes: "You'd have to be completely unfirewalled to see damage. The remote control opens on ports 7111 and 7222, and it doesn't do anything local except open a listener on one or the other of those ports (there are (so far) two variants, the only reported difference being that port number). If you (as I do) set your machines up with French Foreign Legion firewalling rules ("you shall do nothing except") then this won't be a problem for you.
"I'm also seeing a lot of ssh login attempts recently, on those few machines I have which still run sshd on the default port."
One of our editors then replies, "It's a pretty punky threat. Poor little feeble thing."
Followed by: "Perhaps we can ask the authors to publish the source, so we can have a real threat for a change?"
Our technical media has gone from reporting on technology to acting like PAPARAZZI .
For years pundits and analysts in the media have claimed that Linux does not see the security attacks Windows sees because Windows has so much market share and Linux has so little market share.
Not that I ever really believed those arguments, but for those that did believe, this must mean that Linux now has significant market share.
This is definitely the time for all of those analysts to tell their readers to start buying Linux stock.
If you follow the logic, Linux is now competitive.
Maybe they'll put it on their laptops.
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Not that I ever really believed those arguments, but for those that did believe, this must mean that Linux now has significant market share.
This is definitely the time for all of those analysts to tell their readers to start buying Linux stock.
:)