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[–] 29 points 9 hours ago* (8 children)

It actually bothers me that I have to spend Enterprise levels of money to get access to any type of Linux endpoint security a la Bitdefender Gravityzone.

I get it, "they don't make viruses for linux" or some nonsense. When a massive number of corporate servers run Linux, I think it's fair to say that's a target surface for people to develop attacks that can include viruses. I'm just over this idea that we're safe by default or something. You're not really safe unless you make your own personal computer use a giant pain in the ass of security steps just to access basics, anyway.

Anywhodles, anyone got the deets on some actual quality Linux virus/worm/malware protection beyond stuff like security hardening, key authorization, firewalls, dns blackholing for ads, and everything else I already have and set up beyond "virus protection." My servers may not be important, but they're still servers I'd rather not go through the pain of rebuilding.

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  • [–] 19 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

    I don't think people are saying there's literally no viruses for Linux, just that because Linux desktop use is so low, malware developers l developers focus on Windows because that's what most end users will be trying to run their software on.

    It's not a secret that lots of Enterprise systems run Linux. Almost all switching and routing operating systems that run the entire internet are Linux based. But there isn't a person using those. They get configured and then run without user interaction. So their attack surface is different.

    That's what people mean when they say there's no real malware for Linux.

    Most "virus" infections this day are just programs that look legit and trick people into installing them. You're not going to get a Linux server that way.

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  • [–] 23 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

    First of all, username checks out.

    Second, the thing about viruses (as opposed to other types of exploits) is that the user has to run them, and Linux doesn't make downloaded files executable by default the way Windows does. Nor are Linux users conditioned to download programs from random sketchy sources the way Windows users do.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

    Nor are Linux users conditioned to download programs from random sketchy sources the way Windows users do.

    I think about this every time install instructions for something are "run this terminal command to add our repo to your sources". Would probably be pretty easy to get an auto-updating attack path for the unsuspecting. The first drop doesn't even need to be malicious, just ship the virus as an update.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 hours ago

    Yeah, if you're doing some sort of curl | sh nonsense you'd better trust whoever is supplying that script implicitly. On the bright side, I've only ever seen that on the first-party website of the project being installed, so it could be worse.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago

    I think about this every time install instructions for something are β€œrun this terminal command to add our repo to your sources”.

    Or when there's an installation option that's just piping curl/wget into bash, like curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net/ | bash

    It's super convenient! But risky. Even if the fetched script is legit, the command is still one typo'd URL away from fetching and executing something entirely different (imagine squatters sitting on install.pi-hole.com instead of .net and serving a malicious script)

    I appreciated that pi-hole was (and still is) transparent about the drawbacks of this installation method when I installed it years ago.

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