MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Why chdman is trying to connect to internet??

> Being smug, ignoring proper security, and saying "my OS is secure" will land a person
> in an embarrassing world of hurt sooner or later. As market share for OS X grows, so
> will the threats, malware, viruses, hacks, and attacks. Sooner or later, it will
> become "worth their while" for those who pursue such dark avenues.
>
> If you are running *any* OS without firewall or proper anti-virus / anti-malware
> protection, then I hope you aren't connecting to the net.

It has nothing to do with smugness.

I have run Linux for about 17 years now and have *never* run any kind of anti-virus or anti-malware software on it. I have had my own server in a data center for about 10 years now and the most I've ever done for security is to ensure that only the services I need running are running, and there was also a time when I closely read security announcements; but I don't even bother with that any more since my server's functionality has been reduced over the years until now it doesn't run anything other than a web server and SSH. Also the myriad standard Unix services have become *much* more secure over the past 10 years or so; there used to be a time when, e.g., bind and apache were rife with holes; not so much anymore.

I only ever had any kind of problem on my Linux server twice: once was a known exploit in PHP that allowed an attacker to corrupt some of my web pages and to write some files into a part of the web server document directory; but its effect was isolated because it could not elevate to any significant permissions level. I fixed that relatively easily with no significant downtime.

Additionally, I once freshly installed a new server and stupidly chose a very easy password for the SQL service, thinking that nobody from the outside would be able to get to it anyway; but I hadn't realized that a misconfiguration of my SSH server allowed anyone to tunnel ports to any of my internal services and so someone was able to actually log into the SQL server and once again munge some stuff around and write some files. But once again, they were stopped short of any 'real' damage because of the isolation of permissions to the SQL database, so although that service could be corrupted, nothing else could. Also I had backups in both this case and the previous case so recovery was fairly easy.

In terms of my desktop usage of Linux, I have never had any kind of trojan, worm, or virus on my system, after 17 years.

Which is once again not to say that it's impossible on Linux to have a virus, just that it is so rare that it's not even worth worrying about in my experience.

And Linux must already be 'worth the while' of hackers; why wouldn't they want to acquire as many zombie spammer boxes as they could? If Linux has easy exploits I am sure they would be exploited (and I am sure have, in some limited cases).

With regards to Mac OS X, I know that most of the security aspects of Linux that make it as secure as it is are shared with Mac OS X since they come from the same operating system families. This is one reason that I conclude that Mac OS X is secure. The other is that even after searching I haven't found any reports of significant Mac security exploits. Contrast that with Windows, at least of the XP vintage, where the only searching I have to do is call up my mom or dad and ask them how many viruses they currently have on their computers.