Hacker News Reader

Comment by FDSGSG | Hacker News Reader

>By default, there are no services listening.

Desktop linux, not "the Linux kernel". The kernel isn't amazing, but on the desktop side you regularly see downright absurd stuff like this https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2016/11/0day-exploit...

and less surprising bugs like this https://donncha.is/2016/12/compromising-ubuntu-desktop/

The quality of software outside of some widely deployed server software tends to be quite poor, exploit mitigations are not being implemented.

>And what malware runs on Linux?

Far too many to list. You can easily find hundreds of public examples. This terrible wikipedia page provides a decent starting point with a list of names to google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_malware

View on HN

> you regularly see downright absurd stuff like this

That's a bug which only occurs on five year old distributions and which was fixed years before any exploit was ever found. Honestly if that's being brought up as a bad example Linux is looking pretty good compared to other operating systems.

ls -l ~/.bashrc and by design.

Yeah. The first article he linked to specifically called out Windows for doing fonts in kernel-space, to put that gstreamer vulnerability in context.

An attacker can trivial phish to sudo password and execute arbitrary commands every time you open the terminal.

shellrc and profile as well as almost all core unix tools allow running arbitrary code.

You can even bend the paths of bashrc and friends so the user can't trivially inspect them without dropping to root first (at which point, arbitrary code can trivially obtain root access too)

> That's a bug which only occurs on five year old distributions and which was fixed years before any exploit was ever found

I don't think we're reading the same post unless you got confused by the part where he discusses the exploit not the bug.

> Honestly if that's being brought up as a bad example Linux is looking pretty good compared to other operating systems.

Compared to what? FreeBSD? Certainly not any modern desktop OS.

MSFT is investing heavily in exploit mitigations while Linux distros are probably still struggling with ASLR. https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Weston-W...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com