[conspire] linux antivirus?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Blue Boar (BlueBoar at thievco.com):

> I hope no one thinks that I'm trying to support the position that the 
> owners of those Red Hat 7.x boxes that were running LPR-whatever were 
> somehow doing the right thing.  Obviously, there are many things they 
> SHOULD have done differently.  I'm just trying to point out that they DID 
> something stupid, so therefore sometimes Linux users DO stupid things, and 
> these sometimes DO enable worms.

That's missing the point.  The "worm" in both those cases merely
-=automated=- a non-automated remote attacker's easy misappropriation of
system root access (a vulnerability that in I believe both cases had
been left wide open for five-plus months).  

To paraphrase one of my essays, calling it "enabling worms" is like
saying a homeowner "enabled arson" after he left his home wide open and
unoccupied for six months, then burglars finally noticed the house,
stole its valuables, and finally torched the place.  The "worms" are
just a minor aftereffect of a far more basic underlying problem.

It's like saying when an airliner's engines fall off and two minutes
later it augers into the ground that that model's fuselage had a
ground-impact problem.

-- 
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