Full Disclosure mailing list archives

Re: Re: January 15 is Personal Firewall Day,help the cause


From: "Exibar" <exibar () thelair com>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 16:40:40 -0500



I fail to see how "phishing" (not fishing?) type emails relate to
viruses. Those are two totally different types of attack methods. A
virus aims for the weakness in a technical system. Sometimes, it may be
needing a little social engineering though.
Asking somebody to cut his own throat and smile while doing so is
genuine social engineering and has nothing to do with the need for a
virus scanner or technical defencive measures.

I agree, it looked like I was melding the two together into "threats" and
not keeping Viruses/worms separate.  Phishing's a new term that's cropped up
for these types of e-mail's.

While you are right that there is the principal threat of "viruses" to
Linux too, a virus scanner is not the way to protect against such
attacks using Linux.

Minimum usage (only deploy services you use)
       ---can be done on a windows box
File Integrity Checking
       Would have to run Trip-wire or similliar.
Rootkit Detectors (this comes closest to virus scanning)
        A/V scanner will do the job
Firewalling
        Windows XP's builti in ICF, or zonelabs, etc
Rigid Management Of User Rights
        windows can get pretty granular with user rights and permissions.
Encryption
        Windows has built in file Encryption.

These are the concepts for protecting a Linux machine.

Most of them are missing in Windows. Just adding a personal firewall
won't improve matters if the rest of these principles is absent.

Not really missing from Windows, just a bit more cumbersome to do.  I agree
that just adding a firewall is not the sole answer, neither is just adding
A/V software.

 Exibar

_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html


Current thread: