ABM Considered Harmful (was: piercing corporate)

[Derek Martin]

On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 11:11:03PM -0500, bscott at ntisys.com wrote:
>   Case in point: One of your recent messages made reference to VBscript and
> Windows Scripting Host as "Virus Propagation Languages".  If you want to
> call them tools for virus propagation, then you must also call Perl, Python,
> TCL, and the Unix shell tools for virus propagation.  They all have equal
> potential and usage.

I find that I again have to disagree strongly.  None of these
scripting languages, to my knowledge, is built into any user tool
which is regularly used by hoards of users of Linux/Unix systems,
which are themselves configured to automatically and even invisibly
execute arbitrary code embedded in application data.  

> Likewise, just because you have no Microsoft products on your network does
> not mean your network is in any way better protected.  

Given the inherent design flaws I just mentioned (which are lacking on
other platforms generally), plus the numerous others that turn up in
the Outlook/IE/Media Player combo on a nearly daily basis, plus the
lack of privilege separation on most Windows boxen in use today (which
can not be configured in, remember -- most systems still run W98 or
even W95...) I have to disagree here too.  Now, granted this boils
down to numbers; but the world of security is all about risks and
statistics.  If the holes are fewer, then the security is "better",
even if the numbers are 10,000 to 5,000...  You could also talk about
severity, but that's difficult to quantify, and thus to compare.

> I've seen enough hideously insecure *nix boxes in my relatively
> short career to know that your attitude is not just naive, but
> dangerous.  It's the same attitude that corporate PHB's take when
> they buy Microsoft because "Microsoft must be the best".

As I pointed out before, I still agree with this statement and certain
related sentiments, but you seem to be saying that there's nothing
inherently better about security on Linux, and I have to say it just
ain't true.  Many things ARE inherently better, even taking
misconfiguration and ignorant users into account.

 
-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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