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Rootkit as unprivileged user? Unpatched machine.

Installing a rootkit, from an account belonging to an unprivileged user, requires that the machine have a vulnerability which, unfortunately, has remained unpatched. Most modern installations of operating systems allow a choice of manual or automatic patching, so relatively few excuses exist for an ordinary user being able to bring a machine under his/her control with a rootkit. This applies just as much to Windows as to any of the Unixes.

Now, weak passwords over SSL are very, very silly, too. And there are sufficient nasty little payloads out there running, even as I write, to seek out such accounts. The last brute-force attempt on my house gateway server was only six hours ago -- there were many attempts on the root password, and many login attempts to either well-known account names or random names, even my own.

My desktop is XP, my house gateway is Linux (latest CentOS distribution). Both are automatically patched (except for Helix server and Zope on the Linux box), and I'm happy with the services running on the machines. Frankly, I would feel equally as secure these days running Windows on the gateway machine: but I run Linux on the gateway because it's just so much easier to access it from a variety of platforms (via console SSH, X over SSH, or web interface; from Windows, Unixes or Symbian OS), and perform both administrative tasks and read or manage my email and websites.

Posted by: 4:2:2   Posted on: 07/25/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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