what are the major security problems with a linux operating system?

Question

what are the major problems with security on a linux operating system?

Answer 1

realy i dont have any probles with my linux been running linux since 1996 and no major problems yet just a few minor problems linux is better than windows in whole and mac just uses linux kernels to get a head once you use linux you will never want to leave for the other to again original red hat user hardly any viruses i havent ever had a viruse just a few crashe dthat i needed a patch for and they gave me the patches i needed to install they are the best os linux now i use linux mint

Answer 2

The most significant Security problem with ANY OS is the user. Any poorly configured OS is insecure. Linux is vulnerable. Poor selection of passwords, leaving ports open, allowing ordinary users to install system level applications, using unverified download keys etc can allow exploitation...but all are problems caused by the user. Not updating the software is alsoa problem that can affect any OS.



Secondly any system which a hacker has PHYSICAL access to can eventually be hacked.



Thirdly Windows folk say that by being open source, flaws may be easier to find...the corollary is that these flaws are also easier to find by developers and often very quickly fixed. The problem of not updating the kernel to a version that addresses this flaw can be a source for exploitation.



Linux in that sense has very few security issues compared to other OSes

Answer 3

Hubris among the newbies - buying the legend that it is secure, when it is merely obscure. The basic security model is pretty much multi-user Unix, and not much better than Windows XP (assuming you actually use unprivileged accounts day-to-day)



Having a single administrator account (root) rather than a fully granular access control system as on e.g. VMS. So on a big system the admins are all-powerful and can do anything, when you might want e.g. to create operator accounts able to do backups and reboot the system but not hack the passwords. (you can get some of that function with sudo, I guess)



In practice, right now, common ways of hacking Linux are guessing user passwords over SSH and then looking for a privilege escalation exploit, and attacking Web 2.0 websites via SQL injection or XSS, which is more an application attack rhan anything to do with Linux itself.

In the past, there were issues with server processes all running privileged so that a remote exploit gave you root, but that's been fixed with chroot and privilege dropping so that servers can run as unprivileged users.